FIELDS OF EDUCATION, CAREER OPTIONS AND PROSPECTUS

JOURNALISM

What a Journalist Do ?

There are so many different jobs in journalism that it's almost impossible to list them all here. To give you an idea, these are some of the things that a journalist might be involved with:

• Researching stories : Broadcasting companies often employ people whose job is just to research stories and guests. All writers have to research before they can start writing.
   
• Writing news and feature stories : News stories are short and focus on telling you what's just happened – the most important thing first. Feature stories often need a topical 'peg' (or reason) for publication, but they're more in-depth and less rigidly structured. They might be interviews, travel reports, how-to articles or opinion columns.
   
• Take photographs : Multiskilling is becoming more and more a part of life in media, so photography is a useful skill for all writers to have. But some people work as photojournalists and use their pictures to tell the story with very few words.
   
• Edit stories : Subeditors concentrate on editing other people's work – they correct any grammar mistakes, sometimes write the headlines and make sure the publication has a consistent style. In many places subeditors are an endangered species and journalists are increasingly expected to get it right first time because there's no safety net.
   
• Check facts : Legend tells of a time when people were employed just to check the facts in submitted articles. That's rarely seen nowadays.
   
• Plan magazines : Editors are responsible for all the content in a magazine. As you move up the publishing hierarchy, you'll do less actual writing and more planning and management of other writers, subeditors and designers.
   
• Lay out pages : In smaller publishing companies, journalists might be expected to lay out pages as well as write them. For a long time, the standard application for layout was Quark XPress. Now Adobe InDesign is gaining in popularity. It's a valuable skill to be able to edit documents in layout applications.

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