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.