Become a digital or print reporter
I started my career as a reporter at Xinhua News Agency in Chicago, Illinois, during my sophomore year of college. I gave directions to my then-lost but soon-to-be boss while covering a riot at the NATO Summit. Xinhua News Agency is a government-funded wire service and provides news to Chinese newspapers and TV stations in the same way that the Associated Press provides news to U.S. newspapers and TV stations.
The role of a reporter is to talk to people with firsthand knowledge of important things and review documents to discover previously unknown information and tell people about it. Reporters generally avoid sharing their opinion.
During my internship, I traveled to mass shootings, trade shows, and cultural events happening in the midwestern United States and wrote about them for a Chinese audience.
The employment outlook for reporters is poor. The number of available jobs shrinks every year, while the number of journalism majors increases every year. If by some miracle you do get hired but don’t like your job and want to change or are laid off, when you apply to your next job, you will face competition from at least 10 other highly qualified candidates who were also laid off recently. There are a high number of unemployed journalists, a high number of aspiring journalists, and a low number of jobs that everyone is competing to get.
The following advice assumes you are a high school student. For college students, skip ahead to the next bolded text.
My advice is to get an internship or volunteer opportunity with your state senator or mayor. If you are in 8th grade, you will have to volunteer, but you are eligible for a formal internship once you’re in 9th grade. This will make you a better journalist because these two types of representatives do constituent services, which will help you understand the problems people in your community often face. It will also help you understand how laws are made and what types of news stories cause politicians to take immediate action.
I switched from politics to journalism because I wasn’t satisfied with the speed at which problems were being addressed, and which problems were being dealt with first. It felt like boomers were getting all their problems solved, but no one gave a shit about us, and the purpose of news is to show the country and politicians what problems need to be solved immediately. A political internship is the best possible preparation you can have.
College selection is critical. If you want to work at the national level immediately after college, you will need to go to school in NYC or Washington D.C. and do 3–5 internships. Your internships are the single biggest determining factor in where you are hired, and if you are hired.
If you aren’t able to make the financial sacrifices necessary to go to school in NYC or D.C. you’ll have to work at the local level, but you still must go to college in a city that has at least one major newspaper, if not two.
The following advice assumes you are a college student.
Your major should be journalism because it demonstrates to internship supervisors that you are committed to journalism as a profession. Your course selection does not matter. Your GPA does not matter. Writing is not at all expensive to get into, you can do it with your phone.
You will need to do 3–5 internships before you graduate. I speak three languages and had to do six internships before I graduated in order to get hired, and I barely got hired.
I recommend avoiding your student newspaper because they generally spend more time doing internal politicking, haggling over job titles, socializing, and “editing” than actually doing journalism. Attend one meeting and if it looks like being involved with them is going to benefit you, dive in. If you aren’t sure or they seem disorganized, get out and do your own thing, as described below.
You should attend a school board meeting, a city council meeting if you’re in a city or suburb, or a county commissioners meeting if you’re in a rural area. You should write an article not exceeding 400 words. Your article should contain the following elements:
- Problems people talked about during public comment
- Key decisions made or votes taken
- Problems unaddressed by the meeting
Next, write a letter applying for a reporter internship for your local newspaper. Look up the name of the editor-in-chief online, or purchase a physical copy of the newspaper to find their name if the name isn’t available online.
Take your article and print out your letter, put them all in a manila envelope, write the name of the editor-in-chief on the manila envelope in sharpie, and hand-deliver it to your local newspaper’s offices, which you can find on Google Maps.
During your internship, you should come up with a story pitch every single day. You should attend every government meeting possible in your area, and should find a mentor at your paper. Columnists are great mentors.
After your internship, ask if you can stay on as a freelancer. At this point, you should have plenty of mentors with specific knowledge, but if you get to this point and are stuck, DM me on Instagram and I will help, even if you took my advice starting in high school and are DMing me eight years after you read this.
If you still have questions after reading this guide, please DM me on Instagram, unless the question you’re going to ask is “do you have any extra advice/tips?” because I don’t. I put my best advice in this guide.
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