Beat

A beat is the specific assignment filled by a reporter. Each beat is a topic area, usually relating to some aspect of newspaper, television, or radio news. Until recently, the news tradition relied on beat assignments as a means for increasing the expertise and newsgathering ability of key reporters.

Typical beats might include city hall, police, entertainment, finance, social scenes, religion, education, fashion, and sports. Periodically, news organizations have environmental quality and consumer protection beats. Certain news organizations have national and international beats. They might have state capitol, Washington, D.C., or Middle East beats.

By dividing reporters by beats, news organizations can be sure that they cover the important topics, groups, and institutions within their community where news is likely to occur. Once beats are established, reporters are assigned to cover them. This increases the likelihood that the news organization will know what is going on over the full range of news.

Beats add depth to coverage and provide practitioners with predictable opportunities for specific photo-ops. Each reporter can become an expert on the events, people, opinions, and issues relevant to a beat. The dynamics of a community's social scene (society page beat), for example, are quite different—even if interdependent at times— from the city hall beat. Which socialite is hosting which nonprofit event is different from what member of city council is fighting for or against some measure pending before the council. Financial reporting on business trends, economic forces, and publicly traded companies takes special knowledge and insights that differ from sports reporting. Sports reporters need to know the ERAs (earned run averages) of the baseball leagues’ pitchers. Financial beat reporters need to know about IRAs (individual retirement accounts).

Just as beats are important for news organizations, they have a parallel importance for public relations. If a publicly held company is hosting a golf tournament, that is sports news, and it is financial news. In the sports page, the company wants its name mentioned as often as possible because that gives it name recognition and brand equity with customers. On the financial section, it wants to be seen as a company that knows how to gain name recognition and sell products. Such an event might make the social page if the CEO gives a large check to some charity. That news also can help drive sales and might attract investors.

Traditionally, the savvy public relations practitioner knows the reporters on each beat who are relevant to his or her practice. Mutually beneficial relationships can develop between reporters and practitioners.

Today, major changes are occurring in the nature of beat. New media, social media, blogging, and many other trends are eroding the universal sense of beat. A reporter is likely to get pictures and even text that originated in a viewer's or reader's cell phone. As newsroom populations are reduced, [Page 65]more and more newsgathering is derivative of other media sources and lay publics in ways that are blurring the beat tradition.