What do journalists do? In my previous article ‘What do Journalists do? An Introduction to their Job, we ran through the various contexts of
production and workload that influence the work profiles of media personnel. I
shall assume that you have already formed a basic idea about what they do
daily.
Now – broadly speaking,
sorry, broadly blogging – ‘journalist’ is a loose term to describe a
professional who works in an organization that provides news information to the
public. Meaning, you have different and various types of journalists:
- Reporting Journalists (or news reporters)
- Production Journalists
Now you get the idea: The
type a journalist is, also means that his work profile would be different from
another type in terms of workload, nature of profile, and assignment.
To make easier the job of
understanding what a Journalist actually does daily, let us examine the work
profiles of some of the main information-disseminating personnel in news
organizations. The job is far less glamorous I tell you.
What do Reporting Journalists
/ News Reporters do?
Primarily, the role of a
reporting journalist is to collect and disseminate information about current
events, people, trends, and issues – and/or anything of current interest, or
people would be interested in reading about.
Put simply (and I have no
doubt you already know this one) a reporter researches and presents information
in certain formats of mass media – print (newspapers), broadcast (television
and radio) or online (new through the Internet). So his job, basically,
includes:
- Gathering facts (Interviewing people, confirming the occurrence of a reported event, visit place of event, confirm statements or witnesses’ accounts etc. The idea is to gather materials to make it into a "story", i.e., a news report)
- 'Record' the gathered information in a written form (compose and write down report; list event and statements associated with the event into a narrative form)
- Submit story to editor
- Story is published (after the editor has approved it. The editing process involves crosschecking for factual errors, grammatical errors, contextual inconsistencies etc)
The job also naturally means
a reporter with a good nose is an indispensable asset; to smell a story out of
nothing. A candidate needs to be innovative, creative, active and enterprising
and yes, courageous.
Being a very-high-stress
career itself, journalism is not for every bright-eyed lad that walks into a
newspaper or a television news channel with a CV. Few stick long enough to
actually earn respect as a journalist.
Basic job description of
Production Journalists
Production Journalists are
the ones that turn your ugly toads into Page-3 princesses. They are the
- Editor-in-chief / Managing Editor
- Sub-Editors (Asia) or copy editors (UK, US)
- Proofreaders
- Designers
- Photo editors,
- Best Practice managers,
- Video editors,
- Graphics / layout designers,
- Webmasters
and all such personnel
specializing in certain areas of technical production.
What do they do? In the modern Media corporate, production journalists
are some of the highest-paid skill-and-resource workforce.
They are the managers,
the tweakers and the management chiefs. The ones that make sure that the facts
in your story are accurate, comprehensible and systematic. They are the section
that edits your stories and make sure your English sounds civilized enough.
They are the creative eyes that make your 2-pixel photographs look like Ciril Jazbec’s magnum opus.
They are the ones that directly oversee day-to-day operations of the newsroom. They make sure the
photographs personify the story perfectly; that the unnecessary are banished to
the dustbin; that the stories fulfill the demands of accuracy and
comprehension; that the uncertain shades are blacked or whitened. The
production guys are the nerds, the tweakers, the horned-rimmed glasses, the hamburger cool millennialS.
Of all, editorial personnel
function as the second pair of eyes that look for something not visible in a
story.
They are professionals with
specialized skills and expertise in various areas of media production such as:
- Language and editing,
- Designing,
- Analysis
- Experts in multimedia / technological applications etc
Generally, there are no hard stipulations
on working hours for production journalists. Their working hours are counted from
whence they began work, as their skills are applied only as a production
effort, for instance, after reports have been filed by reporters.
©2012 Al Ngullie ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED This article contains material protected under International and
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