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.