LifeDev

photo credit: philippe leroyer

This post is written by Jaclyn Schiff of The Schiff Report.

Unless your workday includes multiple references to deadlines, leads and sources, you probably don’t think of yourself as a beat reporter. But maybe you should.

Beat reporters focus on covering a specific issue or particular sector over time. News directors say that beat reporting helps journalists understand issues better, so their stories can provide their audience with more depth and context, according to this NewsLab article. Chip Scanlan, the director of National Writers Workshops at the Poynter Institute, says that the best beat reporters are “well-organized, determined” and have a “clear sense of mission and a wide range of sources.”

In the age of information overload, thinking of yourself as a reporter with a beat can help you filter information effectively. If you take this role seriously, then applying some of the techniques that beat reporters use to stay on top of the facts could help you to be more purposeful and productive with your own intelligence gathering. In addition, the extensive understanding that you will gain from following an issue over an extended period of time will give you an edge in contextualizing and analyzing information. The benefits of a carefully selected beat could be endless when it comes to work, blogging and even your social life.

The Benefits of Being a Reporter

I’ve seen the benefits of monitoring a beat first-hand. More than a year ago, I began following the global health beat when I started working as a staff writer and Web producer at my current job. At the time, I had a vague knowledge of major global health stories, like the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa, concerns about bird flu etc. I certainly wasn’t an expert. But after just a few months of following the latest news and developments — as part of my daily routine in the office and after work — I found that my knowledge of these issues helped me to develop more ideas for freelance projects, write interesting blog posts and network with people who have related interests.

It has given me something interesting to say when I meet people at events and at other social settings. It’s not because I know as much about the push to eradicate malaria as Jeffrey Sachs or any other global health expert. I don’t. It’s simply because I pay more attention than the average person, which makes me a decent resource on the subject. “Because these days, authority doesn’t come from a badge, or a press pass, or a degree, or a date on a birth certificate. Authority comes from attention,” observes Twenty Set blogger Monica O’Brien in this post.

Finding the Beat

So to start, you’ll have to identify your beat. Most reporters are assigned to a specific beat, and creating your own can be an asset or a burden. Think about your main goals for staying on top of the news and let that guide you towards your beat. For example, if you work in advertising and your aim is to get ahead at work, you could focus on creating your beat around a specific demographic or ethnic group, which will help you develop authority on trends and current information pertaining to that group. Your beat needs to be your niche. This ProBlogger post has some useful tips that could help you to identify your beat, if you’re having trouble.

Once you’ve identified your beat, you can start being proactive about monitoring it. Here are three steps for following a beat based on my experience, journalism training and articles I’ve read over the years:

1) Research the history of the topic. Every issue has a backstory and it’s important to understand this background in order to pick up on future nuances and contextualize new developments. It also helps to identify the key players involved in your beat. Who are the people and organizations involved? What are their agendas and how are they viewed by others?

2) Set up online alerts and feeds to follow the news related to your beat. Use RSS feeds to subscribe to the range of bloggers who are writing about your beat. Establish Google Alerts or a similar service to return daily key word results, then set aside a time once a day or at least once a week to actually go through the results. Depending on how often you do it, it doesn’t have to take more than 10 minutes, and the simple act of skimming can do wonders for keeping you on top of the latest developments. If you find that you’re not going through alerts that are sent to your e-mail then you can do keyword searches in Yahoo News or Google News and review results that way.

3) Go offline. Subscribe to mailing lists for government and private organizations involved in your beat. Make a point of going to events, conferences, lectures etc. that have relevance to your beat and be sure to meet some of the people there and introduce yourself. This is an important way to stay in the loop. Also, be on the look out for interesting stories or angles on your beat when you’re reading the newspapers and/or magazines. I’ve found some really unique ideas that can be applied to my beat from reading through stuff that I would not have come across from a feed or keyword alert.

You probably do some of these things already, but probably not in the context of following a beat. A simple shift in the way you think about how you monitor information can make you a more organized consumer of news and minimize the information clutter. The hardest part is letting go of the fact that you just can’t monitor multiple subjects with the same amount of careful attention. Unless, you’re retired maybe.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t read general news items daily. You should. But if you want to gain the benefits of following a beat, then you have to be selective. There’s a reason that beat reporters often work way more than 40 hours per week to monitor just one subject area.

Jaclyn Schiff is the author of The Schiff Report, a blog about Generation Y. Sometimes her posts include how-to tips, but more often she’s writing about topical discussions that involve millennials.