Career Profile: Reporter

Interview by Janet Scarborough of Jane Hadley, Reporter, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

What are the main responsibilities of your position?
1) Be aware of what's happening on my beat (consumer affairs).
2) Generate good story ideas.
3) Gather all of the information necessary to write a story.
4) Write a story that is accurate, fair, engaging, informative, and easy to read and understand.

What does a typical day look like in your job?
Check my email and phone messages, scan various publications and Web sites for consumer issues of potential interest, make phone calls to various government agencies, consumer organizations, companies, or consumers to check on where things stand with regard to a particular issue or story.

If I'm working on a story for the next day's newspaper, I have to be aware of the clock, because the story has to be turned in by deadline. I have to stay until the story is done and sometimes on a major story until after it has been edited, so that I am available to answer an editor's questions or make requested changes. That means the time you arrive home from work can be somewhat unpredictable.

When there is a major story or on days when we are short on staff, I can be "borrowed" at any time from my beat to do general assignment. Yesterday, for example, an editor came to my desk and asked me to leave for Boeing Field in five minutes, where I would be taken by helicopter to Sequim to report on the killer whales that were stranding themselves. When murders or floods or earthquakes or riots break out, you are immediately drafted to help out on those stories. You can be sent anywhere on a moment's notice.

What do you like best about your job?
Every day is different, and I have a lot of freedom to decide what I'm going to work on.

I get paid to learn. During my 22-year career at the P-I, I've covered real estate, the environment, higher education, courts, and consumer affairs -- and a lot of general assignment in between. You really learn a lot about your community in this job.

I like finding out about things and then telling the public about it. I have sort of an instinctive desire to get to the bottom of things, and that trait certainly meshes well with reporting.

What are the most challenging things about your job?
In no particular order:

1) Managing to tell a complete, fair, easy to understand but nuanced story even when the material is complicated and controversial and doing so within the length restrictions of a typical daily newspaper. You always wish you were afforded a few more inches so that you wouldn't have to cut out this or that paragraph, quote or fact or compress things quite so much.

2) There are times when you are facing a deadline and you are still struggling to fully understand a complicated story. You may find yourself without enough information. Or, more commonly, you'll have lots of information, but not enough time to digest it all. Or you may find yourself with lots of conflicting or confusing information, and you can't reach the person who could help you sort it out. Sometimes, you go to the editor and say, "This story has got to hold. I can't nail it for tomorrow." But there are some stories that must go the next day and can't be held. In that case, you are forced to "write around" the issues that you are unsure about, though that is something you hate to do.

3) Another challenging thing for reporters is having to talk to relatives of people who have just died under tragic circumstances. Most reporters, including myself, absolutely hate doing this, but we are required to do it.

4) As a reporter, your job is to take an objective look at people and situations, but this can be hard on the people you're writing about and can inflame readers. You have to try to figure out a way to give a truthful and accurate portrayal of a person without being unfairly hard or personally invasive.

5) Finally, I do believe reporters sometimes experience a "kill the messenger" response to their stories. If what you're reporting is something readers don't want to hear or don't like, many readers are inclined to blame the reporter. Readers have a wide diversity of responses to a story, often very different from what the reporter intended. A person's response to a story often has more to do with something going on in his or her life than with the story itself. Reporters are like anybody else with all the usual human imperfections, but most of the reporters I know are conscientious and try to do a good and fair job. Sometimes it seems as if the public does not give them credit for that. I personally don't have too much of a problem with this on the consumer affairs beat, but reporters doing other types of stories that spark an emotional response in people can have this problem. Reporters need to have thick skins.

How did you land this job?
I was lucky, but I also had to hustle. I first applied to the P-I in the mid-1970's at a time when the newsroom was 90% men and I think maybe they were trying to hire more women. They said they would add my name to the "extra board," which was a list of people they'd call when they got in a pinch and needed somebody to come in on short notice for that day. I had very little experience and was at the bottom of that list, and at first they never called me. I would call them up and say, "I'm still here, but you haven't called me."

Finally, one time in the summer when lots of people were on vacation or sick and Charles Lindbergh died, which was considered a big story, they called me in. I was really quite inexperienced and didn't really know much, but I was determined to hustle and do whatever they asked of me. They called back more and more and then offered me a full-time summer intern job. After that summer, I was asked to be managing editor of a weekly called the Seattle Sun, which I did for 2 1/2 years.

A year or so after I left the Sun, I happened to apply for a full-time job at the PI when they had a temporary opening for real estate editor. I knew nothing about real estate, but when I heard they had the opening, I declared an interest in real estate. Since they needed somebody right away, and it was just a three month job, they didn't ask too many questions, and I was hired. I worked my way into a full-time permanent job from there.

What was your professional background before accepting your current job?
Not much. I had worked for one summer eight years previous as a summer intern reporter at the Kansas City Star, an employee-owned newspaper that tended to hire the children of its employees. (My father was an employee there.) I never studied journalism in school, nor did I work on any school newspapers. I went straight to graduate school in political science to the P-I. This is not at all a typical career path.

What is your educational background?
B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. M.A. in political science from UCLA. Three years in the Ph.D. program in political science at the University of Washington.

What skills are most important to succeed in your work?
1) Ability to write clearly, grammatically, imaginatively, brightly.
2) Judgment to decide what is a story, what is not, what information to include, what to leave out. Judgment to know how to be fair and balanced, how to simplify and summarize yet still be accurate and informative.
3) Perseverance and aggressiveness at gathering information.
4) Ability to analyze information.
5) Ability to do all this on deadline.
6) Willingness to interview anybody any time any place under any circumstances.
7) Attention to detail to ensure accuracy.

What advice do you have for someone who wants a job similar to your job?
I would say that experience and attitude are the most important things, assuming, of course, that you have the required skills for the job. It's not necessary for you to major in journalism to work at a newspaper, but before you can get a job with a major metropolitan daily, you generally need to distinguish yourself at smaller papers or in an internship and work your way up to a job with larger newspapers. Attitude-wise, you've got to demonstrate a willingness to hustle and be aggressive and persistent without, of course, being obnoxious or difficult to work with.

Though not necessary, a bachelors or masters degree in journalism from one of the better journalism schools (Columbia, Northwestern, Missouri, Berkeley) can be a help.

For undergraduates, I'd advise taking a course in economics as well as political science. You don't by any means need to major in these subjects, but one or two courses would be helpful for newsroom reporting (as opposed to features writing). Other liberal arts courses, such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, biology, chemistry, physics, history, English, and doubtless others will come in handy. It will help you to have a good broad education.

Are there any commonly held misperceptions about your career that you would like to clarify?
The public often talks about "the news media" as if it were a monolith. But it is important to distinguish between TV and newspapers, between different types of newspapers, between types of stories, and even between individual reporters.

A newspaper reporter typically gathers much more information for a story than he or she ends up using. The reporter selects what she needs to tell the story in the space allotted. Sometimes a reporter may interview many people for a story but use only a short quote from one person. Many people don't understand that this is how reporters work and will say: "Gee, I talked to that person for 45 minutes and then he just used one sentence and it wasn't even the most important thing we talked about." This is an understandable thing for somebody to think. However, the story isn't necessarily about the person being interviewed, but rather is usually about some other topic. The reporter takes information and quotes from all sorts of places and selects what is needed to tell the story. Everything else drops to the cutting room floor.

What is the income range for persons in your career?
At a major metropolitan newspaper, $40K to $65K.

What are your long-term career goals?
I'm happy doing what I'm doing.

Any other comments?
It's a great profession!

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