Gathering the News

Reporting and Reporters

Reporting is a journalist's word for research, for the collection c data, for the gathering of facts.
This research is topical. It dea with current events and contemporary issues and peopl
Reporting is the art, the skill, the business, the profession of gat ering information for immediate
use.
The pace at which reporters work and what com pase vacy a great deal Reporters who work for
the A deadlines almost every minute, since they serve he time zones and with varving press
times. Brendes deadlines of frequent, sometimes hourly, news bro in large cities may publish
several editions a day. Re semiweekly newspapers work at a different pace. zines may work
against a deadline that is from away Investigative reporters for newspapers some months on a
story. But whatever the pace, reporti rent and the contemporary, and its goal is to del and alive
and timely

Where Reporters Work

News is gathered and distributed and finally delivered to the news-hungry public in a variety of
ways and by a number of different organizations and agencies. Newspapers gather news for
their own use and deliver it directly to

readers.

Wire services, the Associated Press, United Press International and

Reuters, gather news and distribute it to newspapers and other publica

tions. They also distribute news to radio and television stations.

Broadcasters-that is, television and radio networks-gather news

for distribution to network affiliates. Local radio and television stations

maintain their own news staffs.

Supplemental news services, like the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Service,
gather news for their parent organizations and for distribution to other newspapers. News
bureaus, like the City News Bureau in Chicago, provide special

news-gathering services to client newspapers and others. Newspapers, news magazines,

business publications and many other publications also maintain news bureaus in Washington
and other cities to gather news for their own use. Gannett maintains a Washington bureau to
serve members of the Gannett group. Gannett also maintains news bureaus in the capitals of
states in which it has one or more newspapers,
News magazines maintain extensive networks of news bureaus and correspondents, not only in
this country but around the world.

The business press, as noted in Chapter 1, is a large and growing seg ment of the news
business. These specialized newspapers and magazines employ large numbers of reporters
and writers in this country and around the world.

Other periodicals also provide work for thousands of reporters and

e

Reporting and Report

editors. The Magazine Publishers Association has estimated that there are now more than
11,000 periodicals. These publications provide news and information, opinion and entertainment
on subjects ranging from agriculture to zoology. The highly specialized and segmented
magazine world relies heavily

on the work of free-lance reporters and writers. Public relations is a huge secondary news-
gathering and news distri bution network. Business, industry, government, social service
agencies, associations, special interest groups and educational institutions gather news and
write news and feature stories about their own activities for distribution to newspapers,
broadcast stations and other primary dis tributors of news and information. Public relations and
public informa

tion organizations are an important adjunct to the mass media. The press and public relations
have a symbiotic relationship-they need each other. Public relations people need the press if
they are to tell their story. And the press depends on public relations people as news sources.
Despite this close working relationship, the press and public rela

tions are quite different fields of activity. The press has public responsi

bilities. Its job is to keep the public informed and to serve the public

interest. Public relations, on the other hand, serves a private interest or

at best a quasi-public interest-the interest of a business, political party,

religious organization, advocacy group, government agency or other

institution.

The Reporter

Reporters are the foot soldiers of the news world. They are the represen tatives of newspapers,
news magazines, wire services, radio and televi sion stations and the networks. Reporters go
out into the world and bring back the news of the day. They are the eyes and ears of the press.
Reporters, like the rest of the human race, come in all shapes and sizes. Probably 40 percent of
reporters are women. On daily newspapers, about 13 percent of newsroom staffs are members
of minority groups: blacks, Hispanics and others. Some are gay or lesbian. Many very young, for
most entry-level jobs in the news business are reporting jobs.

Reporters come to their work from various backgrounds. Many are graduates of schools and
departments of journalism. Others were liberal arts majors and arrive in the newsroom with
degrees in history or politi cal science or English. You will find a good many reporters and
others in the newsroom who have changed careers and have moved from teaching, nursing,
medicine, the sciences, business or the law into journalistic jobs. Many minority journalists have
been recruited from other lines of work.

Gathering the News

Nearly all news people today have at least a bachelor's degree, and you will find many with
master's degrees and some with doctoral degrees. A sound education is the sine qua non of
today's journalism. Reporters and others in the newsroom are a diverse, heterogeneous lot, but
they all have one thing in common-a strong belief in the impor. tance of the press and its
mission and, for the most part, a sense of sat

isfaction in their work.

Reporting for Newspapers

The newspaper is a highly organized and specialized news-gathering organization. Figure 2.1
shows how a news staff is organized into desks and departments responsible for various types
of news and for special news problems. This figure presents a fairly traditional picture of the
division of labor within a newsroom. Newsroom organization varies greatly, and the form it takes
depends on the size of the newspaper and the degree of specialization necessary to publish the
particular newspa per. Newsroom organization has changed a great deal in the past decade,
partly due to the computer technology by which newspapers are now produced, and partly in an
effort to involve more of the news staff in planning and carrying out the news-gathering process.
A more innova tive newsroom structure is shown in Figure 2.2.

The chief executive officer of a newspaper is the publisher, who is responsible for the overall
management of both the news and business sides of the newspaper. The publisher is
responsible directly to the own ers of the newspaper.

At the top of the hierarchy in the newsroom is someone, variously titled executive editor or
editor. Usually the editor of the editorial page reports directly to this most senior editor.
Reporting to the executive edi tor and responsible for all other newsroom activities is the
managing edi tor. The news editor, sometimes called a wire editor, is generally respon sible for
selecting stories from the news wires and directing the work of the copy desk, where news
stories are edited and headlines written.

Some large newspapers have two managing editors, one for news and one for administration.
Some newspapers now have design editors, who are responsible for design and graphics, and
systems editors, who are responsible for the newsroom computer system.

Depending on the size of the newspaper, the various editors-sports, features, Sunday, lifestyle-
may-each have one or more assistant editors working under them, and on larger newspapers
each editor-sports, fea tures and so on-may also have a separate copy desk. Smaller newspa
pers usually have a universal copy desk that edits copy for all pages and sections of the
newspaper. Some newspapers have additional desks, for

Reporting and Reporters

Publisher

Editorial Writer

Editor

News Editor :

Metro Editor

Copy Editors H

Clerks, Librarians

Assistant Metro Editor

Feature Editor

Photo/Graphics Editor

Sports Editor

Metro Copy Editor

Metro Reporters

Photographers

Reporters

Figure 2.1 Organizational chart for the newsroom of the Jackson (Mich.) Citizen Patriot, a small-
city newspaper published afternoons during the week and on Sunday morning. The Citizen
Patriot, a Newhouse newspaper, has a circulation of 37,000.

example, a national desk to handle national news from news bureaus,

correspondents and news services and an international or foreign desk. Some newspapers
occasionally set up special desks to handle extra ordinary news stories-for example, a special
political desk might be organized during a presidential election season. A number of
newspapers have an ombudsman or readers' representa

tive who acts as a sort of referee between the newspaper and its readers.

Newspapers generally use their reporters in two ways. They assign

some to specific areas called beats, and they keep others on call as gen

eral assignment reporters to work on anything that needs to be done. Beats were traditionally
places. News regularly occurs at city hall, police headquarters, the courthouse, the offices of the
board of education and the state capitol, and so reporters were assigned to those places.
Newspapers maintained pressrooms, desks and their own telephones for the convenience of
reporters assigned to beats in police headquarters, city hall and the state capitol.

Chapter 2

Gathering the News

Weekend/Special Projects

Quality of Life

Advance News Editor

Day News Editor/Night News Editor Night Metro Ealitor

Passages/Learning

National

covering)

ing on the

school syn

environm

well as to

Ther

as a m
bureaus

still mus

treat ne

Repo

News

issues

news

both

adva

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Transactions

17.3

Readers Desk

Graphics

Photographery AME MEAME

AME

Presentation Desk

Community Roots

E
Leisure

Sports

Investigative Team

Governance

City Life

R-Reporter P-Photographer

A- Artist

NA-News Assistants

AE-Assistant Editor

AME-Assistant Managing Editor

PD-Page Designer ME- Managing Editor

CE-Copy Editor EE-Executive Editor

E-Editor

Courtesy of The State Newspaper, Columbia, SC.

Figure 2.2 The State, Columbia, S.C., has reorganized its newsroom in "circles," groups of
reporters, editors

and others who work closely on related categories of news. There's some innovative vocabulary
here-for example, the presentation desk where copy editors and page designers work together.
More traditionally this would be a copy desk and page designers would be called makeup
editors. Note that there are still lines of authority running to editors who have an overall
responsibility.

The geographical concept of reporting was efficient and provided for thorough coverage of the
news as long as news was considered to be what happened in police stations, courtrooms and
city halls. However, the concept of news has changed, and today the beat system, based on
assigning reporters to places, has been modified and largely replaced by a system that assigns
reporters to subject matter or special activities.

Newspapers still cover in a limited way things that happen at police headquarters and in the
courtroom, but they are more likely to view police stations and courts as part of the larger
problem of law enforce ment and criminal justice. The education beat is no longer a matter of
30

Reporting and Reporte

covering just the occasional school board meeting but rather of report ing on the whole process
of education and on activities throughout the school system. Reporters are assigned now to
broad areas like health, the environment, consumer issues, lifestyles, entertainment and the
arts, as well as to business, labor and politics.

There is still, of course, some geographical assignment of reporters

as a matter of convenience. Newspapers establish suburban news

bureaus or state capital bureaus or bureaus in Washington. Reporters

still must visit places to cover stories, but the idea of news gathering is to

treat news more broadly and to follow it wherever it leads.

Reporting the Expected and the Unexpected

News gathering today is organized to deal with news as it concerns issues, problems and
activities, but newspapers, wire services and other news agencies must also be organized on
another basis: to cope with both the expected and the unexpected.

A great deal of news is anticipated. It is possible to arrange well in advance to have a reporter
available to cover a baseball game, a concert, the monthly meeting of a school board, a primary
election or a political convention. A considerable amount of news in the daily or weekly news
paper derives from scheduled events in sports, entertainment, govern ment, politics and other
areas of human activities.

You can get a pretty good idea of the scope of scheduled activities in

a community by scanning the weekly calendar. Most small city and com

munity newspapers run column after column of notices of scheduled

meetings and programs ranging from Alcoholics Anonymous and AIDS

support groups to zoning board hearings. Newspapers and wire services must also be ready to
deal with the unexpected, with spot news. A news staff must be large enough and expe rienced
enough and must be deployed in a way that makes it possible to report on sudden disasters.
These tests of news-gathering organizations come in the form of five-alarm fires, train wrecks,
plane crashes, hurri canes, tornadoes, blizzards and earthquakes-and more recently in the form
of attempted assassinations, hijacking by terrorists and terrorist bombings. Catastrophe never
comes at a convenient time or in a conve nient place. The earthquake in Los Angeles in 1994,
for example, occurred a little past 4 a.m. News staffs must and do rise to the occasion.

Made News

There is also a category called made or planned news. Sunday editors plan ahead so as to
have feature stories for the front pages of sections in the coming Sunday issue. Editors assign
reporters to interview imporpter 2 Gathering the News

tant or interesting people, to write personality sketches or background stories. They arrange for
scientific public opinion polls. Biographical sketches needed for eventual use in obituaries are
assigned, written and filed away. Major investigative stories are carefully planned and may
require months of reporting, writing and editing before a story is pub lished. None of these fall
into the category of either scheduled news o unexpected news. All are created, thought up, by
reporters and editors. Some story ideas are suggested by readers or by press releases. All
these are planned, developed and written to organize information and te enlighten and inform
readers about a variety of things.

The production of the newspaper is a series of carefully planned steps beginning with the
reporting and writing of a news story and ending with the delivery of the newspaper to a reader's
doorstep or a newsstand.

What Reporters Do

An editor once defined reporters as people who get what they are sent for. Some editors define
a reporter somewhat more precisely in terms of abil ities. Reporters, they suggest, must be able
to meet deadlines, must be able to write, must be able to gather information and must be able to
generate ideas for stories. One editor has suggested that reporters are people who know how to
dig out information, whatever the source and no matter how hidden or obscure.

How one reporter works and how he views the responsibilities of his job is shown in Figure 2.3.

Reporting Skills

We might define the reporter in terms of the skills needed to gather infor mation about a wide
range of events and human activities. Reporters should be skilled at:

Seeing and hearing.

Taking notes.

Finding information.

Asking questions.

Checking and verifying information.

Analyzing and interpreting information.

Editors think themselves especially blessed if their reporters can also write well. Not all
reporters can write well, and not all good writers are
Rep

Covering spot news demands quick work and often a lot of luck. But the Shockoe Slip fire
offered me something that I seldom get on my

job_time. I live by four rules on this job: Get it right. Get it first. Get it all. And if I can't get it first,
then I try to write

it better than anyone else. The fire occurred in the morning. Because of our deadlines, my news
paper would be the last news organi- zation in town to report the event. Before reading the
Times-Dispatch the next morning, many people would have seen the fire on television or read
about it in the afternoon paper, The News Leader.

We're used to covering news first, but fate wouldn't permit it. If I couldn't do it first, the next best
thing was to get it all and do it better.

Before police got to the scene of the fire, I was there. I had seen the smoke blocks away,
requested a pho- tographer and rushed to the Slip on the edge of downtown.

What I found there is seldom seen even at the city's largest fires. People rushing from their
businesses looked ready to panic. Some were crying. Some were ghostly white.

As I got to the scene I could see and hear explosions. Firemen were calling for help over and
over again. The photographers arrived. My editors were told I'd need some room

in the paper for a rather long story. I

let them know that Main Street and

the Shockoe Slip area were in danger.

This was what I needed to get across to my readers. It was a big fire, but it could have been
much worse. I wanted them to feel the tension as firefighters fought the flames, feel the heat as
it melted a plastic cover on a

fire truck's lights, hear the explosions and see the smoke. I wanted to bring them there. I wanted
them to under stand why those people rushing from their business were upset.

The only way to do this was with details. How many explosions? How many fire trucks? How hot
was it? How much water was used? How big an area was evacuated? Because I have covered
events like this for two and a half years, I have a good under standing of all the emergency work
ers involved. And because I had extra time, I was able to contact people in the emergency
communications room and the water department for that added little bit extra.
Ironically, used the extra time to gather information and not to write. Once I had my notebook
loaded with facts, I sat down and began typing. It was 6 p.m., and I had only an hour and a half
to have the story to my editors.

I just went through my notebook. As I found something more impor tant than what I had just
typed, I inserted it between paragraphs already written.

I then went through the story smoothing it out so it didn't read like a bunch of paragraphs just
stuck together.

I rewrote the first two or three paragraphs about five times. Finally just moments before deadline
I wrote the final version of the lead, "How ashes rained on Main Street..."

A bit dramatic, but the intensity seemed just right. If the readers read the first phrase, they would
know they were getting more from us than they had gotten the day before from either the
afternoon paper or the broadcast media.

Figure 2.3 Frank Douglas, then a staff writer for the Richmond (Va.) Times Dispatch, not only
tells how he reported a major fire but also tells a lot about how a reporter thinks. At the time
Douglas wrote his fire story, March 1985, he was 24 years old, a graduate of Ohio University,
where he had earned a bachelor of sci ence degree in journalism, and a police-beat reporter
with two and a half years' experience. His beat included all the police and fire departments in
the Richmond area, the Department of Corrections, the district courts, the U.S. Secret Service,

the FBI and other federal police agencies. good reporters. There are those who can do both
well, and these are the stars in an editor's crown. Some reporters don't have to write.
They phone their stories to the rewrite desk, where the story is written by someone else.
Some able reporters write only passably well but excused because of their special
talents as reporters. The reporter, however, would do well to master the skills of bothing
are and writing. y tele

A Nose for News

understanding of news A nose for news is a newsroom metaphor for an and news
values and the ability to recognize a story when it comes along. A nose for news is not
something one is born with. It is acquired, it can be developed and it improves with
experience. Experienced reporters often appear to have a good nose for news because
they have had long exposure to how editors think and what readers want to read in the
newspaper. They also have acquired through experience a knowl edge of news sources
and, in addition, friends and acquaintances who tip them to news stories. They have
learned that much news is cyclical or repetitive and are able, because of their
experience, to anticipate things that will happen.

A political reporter, for example, may sense because of long experi ence that a state
senator or governor is in political trouble. In a situation like this, an office holder
sometimes decides not to run again rather than risk defeat at the polls. The reporter
watches the situation, asks the right question at the right moment, and breaks the story
that the senator or governor will not be a candidate again.

The reporter in this instance does have a nose for news, but it is less intuition than
experience, less instinct than a broad knowledge of the political scene.

Observation: Listening

A great deal of what reporters learn comes from listening to people talk. News is
gathered over the telephone, at the scene of an accident, at pub lic meetings, lectures
and programs. Reporters soon learn to listen with a selective ear and to listen carefully.
This is an especially important skill. Successful reporters get on well with others, are
able to chat comfortably and purposefully with strangers, and are able to draw out news
sources in meaningful conversation.

Selective listening is important because not everything that is said i important or

interesting. Reporters must learn to evaluate as they listen

and to take notes only of the useful, interesting and important things that are said. The
experienced reporter knenes that it is not possible to write a story that includes
everything said during a long city comcil meeting As the meeting proceeds, the
reporter's discriminating ear weight and evalustes, chooses and rejects

Careful listening is important, ton. Good reporters strive to get it right the first time. They
rero in on the names, dates, figures, facts and statements that provide the framework
for a story. You can't always ask a news source to repeat something, and you don't
always get a chance to verify spellings or figures with the source later on

Listening also requires the reporter to develop an ear not only for what people say but
for the way they say it. Direct quotation and dia logue are useful devices for explaining
things or making a story more interesting. But you have to hear what people say before
you can put a direct quotation or dialogue into your story.

Reporters may use tape recorders to supplement their listening skills. but the tape
recorder is a backup, not a substitute for the human intelli gence that goes into reporting
A taped record of an interview can be extremely useful in verifying a quotation. A taped
record of a public hear ing or city council meeting can be helpful in double checking a
figure tossed out during a prolonged meeting. Reporters must depend on their own
skills first, then take advantage of mechanical help - a tape recorder or an advance text
of a speech.

Observation: Seeing
Much reporting is based on asking people what they saw or did and writ ing a story
dependent on that observation. This is a workable approach that results in acceptable
and accurate news stories of a routine nature. This approach is also acceptable when,
because of time, distance or some other barrier, the reporter can't do the observing
firsthand.

But experienced reporters are trained observers, and when they are on the scene and
can observe things for themselves, a more vivid, more accurate and more interesting
story results.

This is partly because experienced reporters know what kinds of things make interesting
reading and partly because they know what facts, what details, make a story complete.
But a lot of the color and. background that make a story come to life are the result of
careful observation. The careful and experienced observer sees what people do notes
the weather, the size of the crowd, colors, sounds and backgroun incidents. Out of
these bits and pieces the whole picture will emerge, picture that will enable readers to
visualize the scene for themselves.

Gathering the News

Finding Things

Reporters, the saying goes, don't have to know everything, they just have to know how
to find out. And this is basically true. Through experience, reporters learn a great deal
about their beats and other subjects they cover regularly. In time they accumulate a lot
of knowledge. But no one can know everything, and reporters are no exception, They
may not know, but they know how to find out.

Experienced reporters learn as much as possible about their own community. They
know something of its history, its geography and its government. They know the names
of the principal streets, the names or numbers of the major highways, the airlines and
the buses that serve the community. They know the names of public officials and people
fre quently in the news, and they know how to spell these people's names. They know
the titles of public officials, and they know or know where to find their phone numbers.

Against this background of general knowledge about the community, experienced

reporters build lines of communication to news sources. They carefully build friendships
and develop acquaintances and con tacts. They learn who knows what around town
and whom to ask when information is needed. An experienced reporter can get on the
telephone and pull a story out of the air in very few minutes.

Good reporters talk to people every chance they get. A reporter for a Washington
newspaper told me that she was once tipped to a good story by a custodian at the large
office building that housed the federal agency she covered. She asked: "Why me? Why
did you tell me instead of one of the other reporters?" "Because you're the only one who
says good morn ing' to me," he replied.

And experienced reporters know how to use public records and pub lished information
available from government and other sources. They know how to use libraries. They
know how to locate and read annual reports, budgets, proposals, minutes of meetings,
court records and sta tistical data of all kinds. An experienced reporter knows what kind
of information can be found in the city treasurer's office and what is in a court clerk's
records. And experienced reporters know that there is a lo of useful information in the
records of the register of deeds and in the ta collector's office. It may take some digging
to get a specific piece of info mation, but almost always the information is there and can
be found b those who know where to look.

Put another way, there is generally a paper trail that the skill reporter can follow. The
computer has created both barriers to acquiring informat

from government records and an opportunity. More and more govement records are
being stored in computer files. This makes them less

Repor

accessible--you can't just ask for a record at the counter in the county clerk's office. At
the same time, it also makes them more accessible if you are able to access computer
files-data banks-through a newsroom.com puter: Which brings us to another skill that
will be required more and more of reporters; computer literacy. The reporter who
understands and is com fortable with computers can access huge data banks, sort out
the informa tion needed and analyze it with the help of the appropriate software.

On simple things, reporters can find answers quickly because they know whom to ask
and where to find the record. Many times the infor mation is not easy to find, and
reporters have to use ingenuity and per sistence to get what they want. But experienced
reporters work on the premise that someone knows, that somewhere there is a book, a
record, a report, a data bank that contains the information they need. They keep asking
and digging, and eventually they find what they want.

Verifying Information

Checking, cross-checking and verifying are basic steps in reporting. Reporters often talk
of two-source or three-source stories, meaning that the story was based on information
that was verified by two or three knowledgeable and reliable sources.
Careful reporters check everything. They take nothing for granted. They check
spellings, dates and figures with news sources. They check facts with other sources and
compare their findings with written records They use city directories and telephone
books to ensure the accuracy names and addresses. Legislative handbooks and state
manuals are hel ful in checking the names, titles and responsibilities of public officials

Reporters learn early that it is easy to make mistakes unless inf mation is carefully
checked and verified. Editors are impatient w reporters whose copy contains
inaccuracies. Complaints from read even libel suits, can follow careless reporting.

Accuracy derives not only from careful reporting and painsta verification, but also from
the care with which reporters handl information in their own notes and in their own copy.
It is easy to read your notes and to introduce errors into your copy. It is easy t read
something in an accurate record and to put a wrong nam wrong figure in your notes.
Careful checking at each stage of the ing process is essential.

Careful reporters verify and cross-check as they go along. A they have written their
copy, they read it carefully, line by line, to it corresponds to their notes. The words all
names verified at the start of your copy are r

to an editor. A (correct) or (CQ) inserted after an unusual spelling or a

hering the News

questionable figure in a story is additional evidence of care and accuracy on the part of
the reporter.