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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).
  • 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).
  • Category Flexibility - The ability to generate or use different sets of rules for combining or grouping things in different ways.

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.
Median Salary: $56,680

This page includes information from O*NET OnLine by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 license.