r/Journalism

Hi, I made this one. I've played Wordle-likes for years and always wanted to build my own, but I never had an idea that felt like mine.

The push came from a strange place. Half of what I read these days is written by AI, and it's never short. Every email, every doc, twelve words where five would do. At some point I said the phrase out loud, long story short, and realised it was a game.

So: you get a twelve-word sentence. You rephrase it in exactly five of its own words. Real English, same meaning, your job is to work out which words carry the sentence and which are just dressed up to look important. Scoring is Wordle style, blue for right word in the right spot, orange for in the answer but elsewhere, grey for out. Five tries, one sentence a day.

My wife and my brother were the playtesters. An early version let "the" beat proper words in the answer, which felt awful to lose to, so the answers now always favour the concrete word. That one change ate a whole weekend.

i thought getting my interview recordings into text would be the easy part 😅 turns out nope. i have a bunch of recordings to go through and manually typing everything out i eating up so much time.. how u guys handling this? especially when 2 or 3 people talking and the audio isn't perfect.

I work at a metro paper and cover the city's surrounding suburb cities as the main part of my beat. Over the past year or so, it seems like the local officials' distrust of the media has skyrocketed. It was already bad for a long time, but now it's in overdrive.

Many elected officials refuse to talk to me or my fellow reporters anymore, and every city I cover, no matter how small, has hired a PR person to control access to staff. They refuse to answer basic questions, provide basic info and aid in my reporting at all. They prefer I say they have no comment in every story, no matter how controversial, rather than talk to me.

Recently, one mid-sized town has started kicking me out of city hall after public meetings so I can't ask the city council members questions. The first time, they escorted me out with police before even asking me to leave.

I've tried all the classic methods: I've tried to befriend the spox, asked officials out to coffee, etc. Nothing seems to work anymore.

Any advice on how to handle this?

(I apologize if this isn’t the right flair for this question.) I’m going to try to keep it vague in case they’re in this subreddit, but my time in this newsroom is coming to an end and there’s someone that works there full-time that I’m really interested in asking out. I’ve only worked with them a handful of times and they were not in any official capacity my superior, but they do have seniority over me. I am no longer going to be working there soon and honestly don’t anticipate that I’m going to be working there in the future, so it brings me to my question: How unethical is it to ask another journalist out? While I am extremely interested in this person, I am also conscious of how it looks, considering I am early in my journalism career, in my 20s, female, and they are not. Advice, anecdotes, etc. are always appreciated. Thanks! <3

There's too much news to cover and I've been triggered by some of the topics that have suddenly come up.

I was sexually assaulted a year ago.

I'm a political journalist and the issue of sexual violence has come up today, as well as religious discrimination in schools. That topic is close to home to me because I am queer.

Other journalists treat this job like it's a big game. They think provoking a conservative member of parliament to say more conservative things is sport and they are pressuring them to front cameras.

I know I should be better at compartmentalising but half the people I interview say my empathy is my biggest strength.

It's hard to know what to do right now. I'm the only non-male in the office this week due to staff shortages. No one in the office knows about my assault and I don't want to tell them I don't want to cover the story.

Hello,

How many times have you covered a crime story while personally knowing the victim or suspect?

I’m less than a year into the profession. Over the weekend, I found out that a shooting I covered was a domestic violence dispute between two friends of mine. One of them is dead.
I wrote it up over the weekend without knowing it was them, and only found out from a friend today. I felt the floor knock out under me. I tried to get to work and do my job, but I couldn’t stop crying and had to leave early. Management was understanding.

I just want to know, how many times in your career has this happened to you? Does it ever get any easier? How do you continue to write crime stories after something like this? How do you write crime stories period?

Any advice is welcome. Thank you.

Shot on a $27 budget. Hostile and negative reviews welcome.

Hey everyone,

I have been a journalist for nearly five years, the past three doing freelance work, mostly writing features and analysis articles.

Before I was journalist, I was in tech for five years.

I think this is by far the hardest year for me as a freelancer. I am finding less freelance opportunities and feel I have fallen behind my journalism peers. I am even trying to find a min wage job to go alongside my freelance work and I am finding no one wants to hire me. I am starting to get quite stressed.

I see a lot of requests for either freelance or full-time video or podcast producing help. I am pretty confident I would have the skills for this style of job based on my journalism and tech background. I just have no relevant experience apart from one semester where i produced small video documentaries (and i am not sure I could still find them to share with companies today.) I really enjoyed editing those videos at the time.

Does anyone have any tips to break into these roles?

I expect some suggestions will be make your own TikTok. I am reluctant to create my own social media account because i don’t really have the face/voice for in-front of the camera and i try to limit these platforms for mental health reasons. I think it would be easier to create a social account if i had a specific beat but my coverage is generalist and i dont feel i have a consistent flow of content to have a channel.

Why is every detail of this trial being broadcast to every corner of the US? I can understand why a trial involving a well-known celebrity or athlete is closely watched but those are people who are already famous before the incident.

I understand why an incident with a child, or an incident involving torture, or a serial killer is closely watched.

The Charlie Kirk trial makes sense to report on; he was already famous with millions of people following his videos.

In this case, the killer and victim were both broadly unknown to the public. No children involved in the incident, no torture, no serial killer.

I’ve recently taken an interest in journalism and I’ve been interviewing content creators as a passion project. I know that the people and topics I cover aren’t that “serious” in the grand scheme of things, but I want to improve on it as a hobby. I don’t plan on making it a career or anything; just purely for the love of the game.

I’m a fresh biology grad, so I have no official schooling in journalism or anything like that. Do you guys have good recommendations on books I can get if I want to get better at interviewing people? I’m going to be traveling to a remote area for research for a couple months and I want resources that I can read offline.

Edit: I’ve read through the Recommended Reading List on this subreddit. Just wanted more recommendations!!

Hi everyone, Lucia here from EUobserver. We interviewed Ukrainian frontline reporter Diana Bucko about something I thought this community might find particularly interesting: what happens to war reporting when the war stops feeling “new” to the audience.

She’s been reporting from Ukraine’s frontline since 2022. She describes how the job has changed dramatically, from the stories journalists tell to the risks they're willing to take.

Drones have made the frontline considerably more dangerous. Many male journalists have joined the army or been mobilised, so frontline reporting is increasingly being done by women. And after four years, she says one of the hardest things is simply finding new ways to tell a story that audiences have already seen hundreds of times.

Meanwhile, the war hasn't become any less real for the people living it.

How do journalists deal with that gap between the importance of a story and declining audience attention?

Would be really interested to hear from you :)