Example Career: News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists
Career Description
Analyze, interpret, and broadcast news received from various sources.
What Job Titles News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists Might Have
- Anchor
- Broadcast Meteorologist
- News Anchor
- News Director
What News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists Do
- Analyze and interpret news and information received from various sources to broadcast the information.
- Write commentaries, columns, or scripts, using computers.
- Examine news items of local, national, and international significance to determine topics to address, or obtain assignments from editorial staff members.
- Coordinate and serve as an anchor on news broadcast programs.
- Edit news material to ensure that it fits within available time or space.
- Select material most pertinent to presentation, and organize this material into appropriate formats.
- Gather information and develop perspectives about news subjects through research, interviews, observation, and experience.
- Present news stories, and introduce in-depth videotaped segments or live transmissions from on-the-scene reporters.
What News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists Should Be Good At
- Speech Clarity - The ability to speak clearly so others can understand you.
- Oral Comprehension - The ability to listen to and understand information and ideas presented through spoken words and sentences.
- Written Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in writing so others will understand.
- Speech Recognition - The ability to identify and understand the speech of another person.
- Written Comprehension - The ability to read and understand information and ideas presented in writing.
- Oral Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in speaking so others will understand.
- Deductive Reasoning - The ability to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.
- Inductive Reasoning - The ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events).
- Problem Sensitivity - The ability to tell when something is wrong or is likely to go wrong. It does not involve solving the problem, only recognizing there is a problem.
- Near Vision - The ability to see details at close range (within a few feet of the observer).
- Category Flexibility - The ability to generate or use different sets of rules for combining or grouping things in different ways.
- Information Ordering - The ability to arrange things or actions in a certain order or pattern according to a specific rule or set of rules (e.g., patterns of numbers, letters, words, pictures, mathematical operations).
What News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists Need to Learn
- Communications and Media - Knowledge of media production, communication, and dissemination techniques and methods. This includes alternative ways to inform and entertain via written, oral, and visual media.
- English Language - Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar.
- Computers and Electronics - Knowledge of circuit boards, processors, chips, electronic equipment, and computer hardware and software, including applications and programming.
- Telecommunications - Knowledge of transmission, broadcasting, switching, control, and operation of telecommunications systems.
- Administration and Management - Knowledge of business and management principles involved in strategic planning, resource allocation, human resources modeling, leadership technique, production methods, and coordination of people and resources.
- Law and Government - Knowledge of laws, legal codes, court procedures, precedents, government regulations, executive orders, agency rules, and the democratic political process.
This page includes information from by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the license.