Book Chapter 14: Covering a Beat

Beats. If there’s one that I’d love to cover, that would be: SHOPPING MALLS!! Em would love to hang out and socialize in malls. I could make friends with the sales people at H&M, get acquainted with the “system” like when new collections come and become part of the community!! For me, the “Be there” part would go perfectly.

The primarily purpose of beats is to get people in involved, which sounds cool. This looks really a community building service.

So, I start researching the newspaper library, which is understandable, cause I wanna know about news in the past, not academic stuff. Yeah, knowing history: the good old Mr. Fisk keeps coming up all the time. And he is right!

But knowing history seems to mean that I have to stalk my sources. I can’t ask “Are you married?” because I already know it: I checked the guy’s MySpace. Instead, I should ask: “I understand you spent your honeymoon at Barbados, how was the Jacuzzi in your hotel room? You know, the one you took of picture of!” Okay, just kidding…

Beats require persistence. I can’t really comment on this, since I don’t really have it yet. But I’m gonna get one soon! I saw they’re on sale at Amazon!

Here a couple things that I found just soo true and so important:
1. Do favor when you can. YES! I hate asking favors. Every time I call someone for an interview, I feel I wasting their time and they’re doing a favor for me. So I’d feel soo much better if I could do something in return!
2. Don’t shun good news. YES! I like to think that I’m a positive person, so I’d love to transmit something good to people. I want my audience to put down that newspaper or switch of that TV with a smile thinking that they got something today. Something that might help them to have a bit nicer day.
3. Protect sources. Loyalty is important. But as the book mentions on the next page, journalists shouldn’t be influenced by what the sources feel, think or what their agendas are.

When it comes to online coverage, the only thing I can say is: RSS feed. Mostly in case of beats, that’s the ultimate invention!

Covering religion. I pretty much agree with what the book has to say about this topic. Actually, I just saw the other day Joel Osteen and his wife on Larry King Live. Osteen is the senior pastor of the largest U.S. congregation. It was interesting.

And environmental beats! They are sooo important. My vision is that one day all those local environment beat reporters will join together and create a global perspective. This way the local publics could be connected and global changes could be made. For example, I was amazed by CNN’s Planet In Peril. Honestly, I couldn’t watch the entire show, but it’s on my do-to-list to download it from iTunes. The point was to connect all those places with environmental problems and to give a big picture of what’s going on globally. I just loved it. If I were to work for CNN (which dream I hope will come true one day) I’d love to do such reporting!