PART FIVE: BASIC STORIES
CHAPTER 13 Covering a Beat
Overview
This chapter is intended to prepare students for covering a beat. We emphasize the principals
involved in beat reporting, but we also explore the new tools available for both reporting and
storytelling. In our experience at Missouri, students are often more familiar with the
mechanics of these devices than their instructors are. The goal here is to show how best to
join the new tools to the traditional goals of relevance and usefulness. Finally, the chapter
addresses reporting on five specific beats: city and county government, schools, higher
education, the police and sports. Some exercises and activities also give students the chance
to work on the religion, medicine and science beats.
Teaching Tips
As you know, the only way to really learn how to cover a beat is to cover one. Your students
probably will have to seek that opportunity outside this course, on the student newspaper or
in advanced courses. Still, the exercises at the end of the text chapter in the workbook and in
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Lecture Notes
I. INTRODUCTION
A. David Nakamura, who covers the White House for The Washington Post, discusses
his beat.
II. IMPORTANCE OF BEAT REPORTING
A. Holding the powerful accountable.
B. Increasing role and dangers of tweeting and blogging.
C. Goal of beat reporting is to provide information and understanding for readers.
III. PRINCIPLES FOR REPORTERS ON A BEAT
A. Be prepared starts with a broad-based education.
1. Read for background go back several years; know the relevant law; know your
s open-meetings and open-records laws.
2. Mining social media social media can be a reporting tool and a way to monitor
and communicate with sources; Twitter and Facebook, perhaps others; be careful to
avoid bias in terms of both how you respond to social media accounts of sources
and your own personal social media presence (some journalists have a personal
account and a separate professional account).
3. Talk to sources first talk to your beat predecessor and your editor; arrange for sit–
down conversations
people, too, so try to get to know them.
B. Be alert
dig deeper.
1. Who will benefit from this, and who will be hurt?
2. How important is this?
3. Who is for this, and who is against it?
4. How much will this activity cost, and who will pay?
C. Be persistent.
1. Insist on a responsive answer cut through jargon and evasions; rephrase technical
language in plain English.
2. Follow up on slow developments
best stories are along the way, not just at the conclusion of events.
IV. BEAT REPORTING ACROSS MEDIA PLATFORMS
A. For readers, interactivity; for journalists, multiple deadlines for different online
opportunities.
B. The Internet and social media offer immediacy; update Twitter feeds and Facebook
posts as news unfolds; rolling reports with continuously updated news; accuracy is
still the imperative, so verify to avoid rumor and speculation.
V. COVERING THE MOST IMPORTANT LOCAL BEATS
A. Information is power; the budget is the blueprint; distributing power and money is
politics.
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B. City and county government.
1. Sources include subordinate administrators, council members, pressure groups,
citizens, opponents.
2. Cities tend to be more efficient, counties more responsive (and often easier to
cover).
C. The schools.
1. Important to communities, demanding and rewarding to reporters.
2. Heartbeat of schools coverage is the classroom.
3. Examine standardized test scores; be alert to other school quality indicators.
D. Higher education.
1. Focus on politics, finances and pedagogy.
E. Police.
1. Educate yourself in police lore.
2. Try to fit in, and lend a sympathetic ear.
F. Sports.
1. Sports reporting is beat reporting explore psychology and literature; look for
losers; look for bench warmers; look beyond the crowds.
2. Developing contacts be there; develop sources like players, coaches,
administrators, trainers, equipment managers, alumni, business managers,
secretaries, former players, anyone who is disgruntled.
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3. Digging for the real story keep your distance; readers want to know the stories
behind the scores and headlines.
Class Activities and Discussion Questions
Activity 1: Divide the class into at least four groups. Hand a different section of the daily
newspaper news, sports, features and business to each group. Ask students to list the
sources that reporters used in their stories within that section. Then ask students to look at the
same section of the newspaper from the previous two or three days. The goal is to get
Activity 2: he same
section (news, sports, features, business) of the daily newspaper. Ask students to identify the
different beats in their section, and then ask them to brainstorm a list of story ideas for the
beat based on the coverage they examined. The goal is to get students to focus on developing
Activity 3: Give students copies of a national trend story from USA Today or The New York
Times. Then ask them to brainstorm how they would localize the story if it were on their beat.
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about a medical advance that originally appeared in a national publication? Discussion
questions: Who would your sources be? What could you do differently with the story that
Activity 4: The local higher education beat writer is trying to localize a national trend story.
Put your students into small groups, and have them brainstorm all the possible untold stories
list for the reporter, as well as a list of questions. Finally, ask them to consider the following:
If the reporter contacted the students, what would they be able to tell the reporter about the
issue? For example, in December 2009, the public radio program This American Life did an
in-depth story on the drinking and party culture at Penn State University. (If possible, and if
you have time, you might play the online version of the story for your students:
Activity 5: Find and post at least eight different national stories on religion, science or
medicine. Pair students and station each team in front of one of the stories. (Make additional
sets of articles to accommodate the size of your class.) For each story, students should record
a quick summary of the story, and their ideas for how the story could be localized different
is similar and what is unique about specialized beat stories on religion, science and medicine?
Should journalism students who hope to cover specialized beats have a second major in the
Activity 6: Put your students in pairs, and then assign each pair a well-known individual who
is often a source of news (local, regional or national). Some possibilities include the mayor of
your city, your member of Congress, the football coach at your college, the college president,
etc. Have each pair scour social media accounts that either belong to the source or reference
Solutions to Textbook Exercises
1. How beat reporters cover their beat is, of course, subject to the interpretation and creativity
of the reporter. Your students should learn some of the unique ways beat reporters do
their jobs. (Remind students to ask their source for instructive anecdotes.)
students to write, and it could also be published in the college newspaper or magazine.
3. This ambitious exercise could guide all your class work for this chapter. Each team will be
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campus and done enough background work to have identified at least most of the key
issues and sources.
4. This is a more ambitious part of the project, and potentially a more fulfilling and
meaningful assignment for students. Encourage your students, as they explore their beats
5. If students have done solid work on the memos for exercises 3 and 4 have
students actually write a beat story potentially the most fulfilling step in the process.
Peer critiques can be very helpful for students, but it might be valuable to have students
from another beat group do the critiquing (and vice versa).
6. Your journalism blog. It seems reasonable to have students start this blog exercise by
looking at how some newspapers are adapting their news coverage for the Web. The
Lawrence, Kansas, Journal World is a well–known innovator. Or you might encourage
Solutions to Workbook Exercises
1. Since most students are already adept with audio, video and the Web, our goal here is to
get them to think about using these tools not for play but for journalism. Increasingly,
newspaper websites are including video and blogs and are encouraging reader responses.
In this exercise, students compare the quality of newspaper and broadcast news websites.
How engaging is each? Why might people visit one rather than the other?
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2. Some students in your class may be working on the campus paper. If so, they can supply
firsthand knowledge. Interviewing them or inviting into class the student editor can
supplement the kind of content analysis this exercise requires.
Students probably will find a lot of mimicking of professional approaches. Many
student papers, like their commercial counterparts, are overly reliant on official sources
3.
However, some websites are providing additional stories, so there may be some
differences there. Encourage students to monitor the website to see if the paper updates
the online news frequently.
4. a. Students will know that the most obvious sources on the central administration beat are
the and those
who take seriously the urgings of this chapter will include secretaries and low-level
b. The techniques for earning confidence are detailed in the chapter. Demonstrating
background knowledge and ensuring accuracy are the most important.
c. For a first story, students should be sure to pick an issue or a personality with high
interest among prospective readers. The rationale for the choice is more important than
are more important than the sources themselves. The local newspaper will provide lots of
clues about both important issues and sources.
6.
what they could do. They may be more interested in the video and webcast possibilities
7. Yo
provide not only tips on issues worth pursuing but also the names of likely sources. The
city website will probably provide names of ranking officers and maybe a table of
extra initiative by actually walking around town and talking to citizens about their crime
or police-related concerns.
8. a. estions outlined in the chapter: Who will
benefit from this, and who will be hurt? How important is this? Who is for this, and
b. Students should describe some method, such as using a tickler file, to ensure they
follow up on the story.
9. You might pair up students and ask them to share their five story ideas with one another
and then pick one or two to pitch to the entire class.
10 11.
politics, medical and scientific ethics, and the cost of environmental cleanup can be found
anywhere. Resources should include documentary sources for background (suggestions
12. This exercise is designed to show the dramatically increasing role of social media in the
life of beat reporters. It might be worth a class discussion to compare how different
13.
day-long study, students will wonder how sports reporters find the time for actual
reporting after meeting their on-air, online and in-print responsibilities.
14. This extension of exercise 13 requires students to closely analyze the beat coverage of a
sports reporter. Students will find it difficult to do the analysis in a vacuum, so it might be
15. It is easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees, as Washington Post reporter David
Nakamura describes in this chapter. Students who are especially plugged into social
16. This exercise is similar to exercises 12 to 14, which focus on political and sports
reporting. Read the tips for those exercises for solutions and suggestions.
17. This exercise requires students to put into practice the short, punch style of writing
required by social media and Web journalism.
18. This exercise is similar to exercise 17, but the focus here is solely on generating tweets
that include a short link to the online version of the story.
19. The emphasis here is on journalistic self-promotion sharing stories using social media
to increase readership and reader interaction.
CHALLENGE EXERCISE
20. Students should understand that by explaining issues in advance and by including
information on the next step in the decision-making process, reporters can empower
readers to be participants rather than mere onlookers in the debate over important issues.
This exercise gives students practice in researching issues, requires them to look for