forward November 2, 2004, as approx...

forward November 2, 2004, as approximately 100 million Americans stream to the persons to cast their votes for president, Mark Halperin, political director of ABC recently made knowns will spend the day roaming ABC's headquarters in strange York City. Part of the time he will remain in his sixth-floor office, where onward the wall across from his desk three TV guards constantly broadcast news reports from ABC and its competitors. He'll monitor the Internet for breaking just discovereds while working the phones, talking with ABC freshs teams across the country to track disentanglements as the day goes on

Halperin will also shuttle to the wager of the ABC News Worm recents Tonight program and the desk of its anchor, Peter Jennings. There, as the polling comes begin to make clear turns in how voters cast their ballots, Halperin will appear forward camera with Jennings, his image and his interpretations of the election conclusions beaming to millions of hearths across the United States.

For Halperin, Election Day is single in kind of those times when his career gives him a chance to fulfill the desire that l him to become a journalist promptly after he graduated from association "I wanted then to be doing what I'm doing now," Halperin says. "I wanted to be someone who dealt with political figures, political issues, and governmental issues [and explained] to clan how the election could affect their lives."

DELIVERING THE NEWS

Halperin will be single in kind of thousands of political journalists focusing all their professional skills onward Election Day 2004. But journalists secrete topics as broad as life itself: from crime to business, from sports to the environment, from celebrities and explosion music to food and travel.

Journalists deliver moderns on TV and radio, in newspapers and magazines, and onward the Internet. Each form demands special skills and a unique approach to communicating the moderns Television, for example, depends forward visual images, which give TV recents reports an immediacy the other forms are hard-pressed to match. A story is told by the agency of images, with words added from the reporter to stitch the story together.

Print stories, however, rely chiefly on words and a limited number of well-chosen photos to number the story. Newspaper and magazine reporters must hang on vivid writing and details to make a story tend hitherward alive for readers. The Internet also relies onward the written word. But unlike a daily newspaper, Internet reports are updated around the dock. That means Internet reporters must be quick to accord to changing news with a spe that is closer to that of TV and radio, on the same level though they are essentially print journalists.

Radio hangs on sound and voice. Radio journalists report freshs the way old-fashioned storytellers do--each story has a clear beginning, middle, and fall of the curtain With a radio report, listeners can't fare back a few paragraphs to check forward a detail, as they can when reading a newspaper article.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty, generally a correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) has worked as a print, television, and radio reporter. During her days as a TV correspondent covering Asia for World Monitor, Hagerty rode forward a long-boat up a thicket river in Burma (now Myanmar) to suited with rebel fighters opposed to the Burmese dominion For another story, she traveled to separated villages in Siberia.

She calls those challenges "the adventures of a lifetime." unless they weren't the dream of a lifetime. Hagerty didn't plan to become a reporter in high gymnasium or even in college. It wasn't until she got an internship at the Christian Science Monitor in her early 20 that, as she explains it, she was "bit on the bug."

BITTEN by dint of THE BUG

What attracts folks to journalism? Whether they had always dreamed of becoming reporters or came to the profession later in life, principally journalists say they are motivated from a strong love of language and story-telling and a desire to investigate.

During her internship, Hagerty says, she base that what she had always lov to do meshed totally with news gathering. "I be fond of asking questions," she says. "I have a passionate affection for telling stories. I love writing. I delight in putting my nose in other people's business--and someone was paying me for it."

At NPR Hagerty started as an editor forward the foreign desk, where she helped organize international coverage. Later she became a legal correspondent. Hagerty reported forward two men who were held forward Oklahoma's death row for 12 years until DNA evidence prov neither undivided had committed the murder for which the sum of two units had been convicted. Her report helped make listeners aware of the potential danger of unjust convictions. "I could alert people" she says, "and then view an effect of a report I did."

That desire to write about issues important to the bulk of mankind can also be satisfied at the local flat says Byron Dobson, a community and religion reporter for the Tallahassee Democrat. In today's fast-paced world where tribe are deluged with national and international of the present days on TV and the Web, Dobson's greatest satisfaction as a newspaper reporter is telling his readers what's going forward right under their noses in their hometown. "People are famishing for local news," he says. "They want to read stories about their neighborhoods. They want to behold you active in their community. That means showing up and it means writing about the public and about how they're affected at the issues. You're the watchdog for the readers."