On occasion, I get questions about my job and what it’s like.
When I first joined G@G, I worked for one community paper before going completely freelance. Now, I’m back at another, slightly larger community paper and I figured why not tell you what it’s like doing my job?
The first thing that will shock you coming fresh out of journalism school is that a lot of the things you thought your profs were dramatizing are real while others aren’t.
While it’s true that, yes, you will have to learn to turn stuff around quickly and you will get the occasional bout of harsh criticism, you won’t be say, writing 5 full breaking news or feature stories per day.
Let me mention quickly that this may vary based on institution, but even being comprised of a staff of about 20, it isn’t usually expected or necessary for a person to take on that amount of work, even though our professors would terrify us and make us think that’s the daily grind.
What is more realistic, at least for a community paper, is you’re more likely going to be working on 5 plus stories at a time, but not necessarily completing them all in one day. That’s just not realistic.
Deadlines can be loose unless the news is breaking (like a murder or a serious accident), so for any given story you may have an assumed week or two to complete it. However, that doesn’t mean you should dick around and procrastinate, because then you’re going to fall behind as stories roll in on the daily. So, while you may have 5 stories all due about 2 weeks from now, you may also get breaking news thrown at you or sudden, up-and-coming stories on top of your current workload.
Rather than writing 5 or however many stories per day, it’s more likely you’ll write 1-3 on top of what we call “briefs,” which are 2-3 paragraphs about something like an event or an update on a developing story. We also format material provided to us by the public, including their opinions on things in the paper.
So, this begs the question: Jane, how long does it take to write a news story?
Well, it depends. If you’re asking me how long it would take to write a story provided I’ve done interviews and preliminary research and fact-checking, then my answer would be about an hour or two at the most for 500 to 700 words.
If you include research, catering to your interviewee’s schedule, conducting the interview, fact-checking and editing your work, then I’d say anywhere between 3-4 hours to a day or two, and that’s only due to the scheduling issue I mentioned.
Sometimes, one story can take the entire week if you’re doing multiple interviews on a heavier subject like court cases, murders, or a feature story.
So, you fill your time working on other stories, briefs, or fishing social media for new material to write.
My personal record for number of complete stories written in a day is 5, ranging from 300 to over 600 words - but this was because I had taken on word from other employees and I was trying to prove my worth.
However, this doesn’t mean we don’t slack off from time to time. Provided all of your big stuff is done, such as breaking stories or events you had to attend, you can spend a lot of time at a desk writing, taking social media breaks, or even resting your eyes and shooting the shit with your fellow employees. Usually the last part happens in the final hour of the day when everyone’s brains are spent and we’re ready to go home.
This doesn’t mean work is necessarily done, though.
For senior employees who operate on a beat such as crime, it’s not abnormal to sometimes be called to a scene and write something up. I’m not currently on that beat (though I have covered crime before) so this rarely, if ever, happens to me.
The “worst” I’ve had since starting this job is having to conduct a couple of interviews on the weekends because my subjects were well-known individuals with tight time tables.
Currently, I operate very much on an open beat, being a general reporter.
Topics I am known to write on are statistic stories, health and wellness, food, community development, events, and the occasional review.
For those of you who I know will inevitably ask to see my work, I’m afraid I can’t show it to you. Working in the media means you have a strict code of what you can and can’t say online, and while some angsty teen posts you made on Facebook a few years ago may be overlooked, my big mouth on G@G would surely get me into trouble.
So, that’s the gist of everything, I’m not sure what else I could really touch on unless any of you were interested in the mechanics of writing a news story, what the editing process is like, how to conduct interviews, so on, so forth.
Let me know if you thought this was interesting or helpful and if there are any other questions you have for me.
Thanks.
~ Jane
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