What do Journalists do?

Reporters
write assigned news stories covering accidents, political elections, holiday parades, fires, crimes, or events in their city. They research, organize, write, and report stories on location, covering or breaking news stories. They are the people who are out in the field, interviewing people and following stories to write when they get back to office. The word ‘story’ in a journalist’s jargon, is the news item, or the interview or the piece of work that a reporter has worked on.

News correspondents
cover news events in large cities here and abroad. They may have to do the job of an entire newspaper staff like report stories, take photographs, layout pages, edit, write, and run the office.

Photo journalists
report stories through photographs. They are generally in the midst of all types of events, taking pictures. Photo journalists are reporters who use pictures instead of words to tell a story. Camera people can also be regarded as photo journalists.

Presenter or Anchor
The TV and radio media also have a fourth kind of journalist-the presenter or anchor. These are the people who you see or hear reading the news. While some anchors are also reporters, some are just presenters. But they too are journalists because they often have to interview people on air and ask relevant questions of the reporters when there is some event being aired live.

Magazine feature writers
Often interview and write stories about a person, event, or topic chosen by a magazine editor. These are in-depth studies rather than late-breaking news.

Editors
Are the people who stay at the office, edit or modify the stories (referred to as ‘copy’) turned in (or filed) by the reporters. At the junior level, editors are referred to as sub editors. Editors are also responsible for layout (the way a page or a news programme looks or sounds) and, depending on their experience, decide which stories go on page1 and which piece to be placed as lead article, page1 anchor or which piece to be placed as lead article (the most important according to its news value) or which stories begin a news programme in case of a news channel. “Trainee editors tend to spend most of their time typing,” says Kushalrani Gulab, a journalist of 10years’ standing. “When I began, I’d be doing television listings physically typing in the TV schedules in the required format so that our readers could check out the programmes the next day. But
after that, things can get very exciting.”

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