First you have to ask yourself something. Do you really want to be a reporter? Or do you just want to be on TV?

Certainly there are plenty of people on television more interested in reading the news than they are in the news they are reading. But you will find that the glory and glamour you expect from a television news career isn’t worth the work you have to put into it if you don’t have the same ambition to research, report and write stories as you do to read them on the air.

There are basic steps you take if you want to become a TV reporter and there are some skills you can develop outside your formal schooling and training that will help you (A) get into the business and (B) help you improve the quality of your work once you get there.

The basic steps you follow are: go to college, do an internship at a TV station or some equivalent work (more on that soon), graduate college, get your first job.

COLLEGE

Yes, I’ve know that Peter Jennings didn’t even finish college in Canada yet he made a decent career in television news. You aren’t Peter Jennings and your father wasn’t the Edward R. Murrow of Canada like Peter’s was so you’re going to have to go to college and learn things like who Edward R. Murrow was.

Although college is a prerequisite for a TV reporter’s job, I should tell you that none of the eight TV or two radio stations I've worked for has ever asked what my grade point average was or even what my major was. Which is good because while I majored in both communications and political science, my GPA was nothing to write home about. Although it was something my father often wrote to me about.

You do want to take some communications and journalism courses but what you really need to do is to follow a course of study that requires you to read and write a lot. English and literature are good choices. Majoring in broadcasting or journalism can help but it's not imperative.

THE INTERNSHIP

What you must do while you are in college is get regular and repeated practice at putting stories together.

In a real TV job, doing a complete story, or "package" as it's called, takes hours -- not days or weeks like a college project might. You must not only learn the process of how a story gets shot, written and edited but how to get through it in one day.

This is where the internship comes in.

Here are the skills you want to learn at an internship: how to come up with story ideas, how to set up a story, how to gather information and interviews for your story, how to shoot a story, how to write a story, and how to edit a story. Once you learn these skills you want to practice them until they become routine.

Even if your career ambitions only include working in front of the camera, you should know how to use a camera and how to edit videotape. At many small market stations you will be your own photographer and videotape editor. Knowing how to shoot and edit can also be what separates you from other applicants for that first job.

Believe it or not, it will benefit you much more if you can do an internship at a small town's station. Nobody will be impressed if you intern at the Today show. A news director doesn’t care if you know whether Katie Couric drinks her coffee black or how many doughnuts Al Roker eats. And that’s about all you’ll learn at one of the networks or big city stations because the only piece of equipment you’re allowed to touch is the coffee maker.

At a small station you’ll not only get a chance to watch people work, you’ll get to do a lot of work. My first television job came in Salisbury, Maryland, which at last check was the 150th largest market. At that station, interns got to do everything except go on the air. They shot and edited videotape, covered stories and even wrote them for the newscast. When they went to cover a story, they could shoot stand-ups and put together a story like a staff reporter would. An intern’s story wouldn’t air but after a semester or two of this real work simulation, he or she could have the qualifications to work at a station in Salisbury, Maryland.

The first question you ask when you start an internship is, "what can I learn how to do so I can be useful to you?" While you have a terrific opportunity to learn from people who work at TV stations, they need something from you, too. There’s something – doing research, making phone calls, answering phone calls, even writing stories or shooting and editing videotape – that you can do to contribute to the news room. The more helpful you can be, the more they’re going to want to help you.

But you have to ask for it. Most of people working in television news rooms would like to help but they don't have time to seek you out and offer. That's up to you. This is where you start showing the initiative you'll need later in landing and doing a reporter's job.

Ask reporters and photographers to go on stories with them. When you’re out there, if time permits, ask the photographer to shoot a standup for you. Write a story and put it together just like it was going to air. Later, watch the reporter’s version of the story and compare it to yours. Did you get the same feel for what the story was as the reporter? Ask the reporter how he or she decided what the point of the story was and how he or she knew what to include and what to leave out to make it fit in the time allotted. Show your story to the photgrapher to get tips on how you could have edited it better.

But don't do this just once. Go out on stories as often as you can. Go with photographers when they're sent out on stories by themselves. Offer to carry the tripod and most photographers will be willing to shoot a little extra video and a standup so you can do a story for yourself. Keep shooting standups and keep putting stories together. This is how you get that regular and repeated practice that you need to polish yourself into a professional television news reporter.

ALTERNATIVES TO INTERNSHIPS

Now that I've told you how important an internship is, I have to tell you something else. I never did one and I survived.

While there is no alternative to having the practical experience and knowledge you’ll need to get a job in television news, there are other ways to get it besides an internship. What I did instead was work at the student television station at the University of North Carolina. When I started we had one camera and one edit suite. With them we cranked out two half-hour shows a week. By the end of my freshman year, I had shot, wrote, edited and reported stories that had gone on the air. OK, it was only the University's cable access channel but it was something.

After four years of student television and a couple of visits to one of our local TV stations to watch how their newscasts came together, I was qualified to work as a professional myself even though I had never taken a single TV production class or done an internship. But I had worked hours at it every week, every semester, for four years!

It helped that because I shot a lot of UNC sports, I got to work alongside reporters and photographers from the local stations and I got to see them work in the field, see what they put on the air, and compare that to how I worked and what I came up with.

My Canon ZR65 cost about $400.

The key is that after college I had a resume tape ready to show my skills and I had practiced those skills so that I could do the work under the daily deadlines I faced when I got my first job.

The digital age has made getting the experience you need a do-it-yourself affair. You can buy a Mini-DV camera for $300-400 and most computers come with basic video editing software. Find people, issues or issues in your community you find interesting and do a stories about them. If you pick subjects not overly covered, it will surprise you how willing people are to help you.

AFTER COLLEGE?

But you're out of school, working another job and would like to make the switch to television news. How then?

If you don't have your own video camera and computer, find a local public, educational, or city/town access cable channel in your area that produces its own programs. Many of them use volunteer (read: no pay) reporters to do stories for their shows. It can give you a taste of what the business is like without you having to leave your current job until you know for sure you like it. If you do like it, you can compile examples of your work onto a tape and send the tape ("résumé tape") out to stations for entry level reporting jobs. (See my page on Résumé Tapes.)

If you want to take the big leap, get an entry level job as an associate producer, news writer or even member of the studio crew at a station in a small town.

From there, the process is the same as that of an intern. Hang out in the news room as much as possible. Tell them your ambition and volunteer your help and free time in exchange for getting to tag along with photographers and reporters when they go out on stories and later write and edit your own versions of the stories.

Most stations will understand that you have aspirations beyond your initial job as long as you devote all your working time to that job. On your off days or after work you practice reporting skills. Learn to edit videotape. For your first reporting job you will likely have to do that but you'll at least need that skill so you can edit together a résumé tape.

Yes, this is a humbling, time consuming, often frustrating process that will require the same drive, determination and patience it takes to work in a humbling, time consuming, often frustrating profession.

RADIO

Most colleges have radio stations. Even if it’s not television, it is live broadcasting which is a skill you will have trouble getting anywhere else. If you get as lucky as I did and can get a job at a commercial radio station, that’s even better. If you work at a commercial station, you’ll have to go out and cover school board meetings, town council meetings and other local events just like you will when you work in television. It’s great experience for learning how to take the issues discussed at long and often boring meetings and turn them into interesting stories.

GRADUATE FROM COLLEGE

That’s the important thing. Get that degree. Like I said, no station ever asked to see my grade point average. It asked to see my tape. Certainly, the work I put in at the student television station and the job I worked at a local radio station cut into my study time. But what I lost in test scores, I gained with commercial broadcasting experience and a tape to show my television news abilities. The trade was well worth it.

GET A JOB

Here you are. You have your degree, you have your experience and you have your tape to prove it. All you need now is someplace to send it to get that first job!

"Contact.Take Off."

The single greatest advantage of doing an internship instead of getting your experience at a college TV station like I did is that you’re working among professionals already in the business who may be able to help you get a job. If you’re at a small enough station and you prove competent enough, you may be able to get your first job right there. If not, people in the news room might be able to give you the names of people at other stations who can help.

Television news is a transient business. Almost everyone in a news room worked somewhere else before he or she worked there. Often those places are the smaller markets where you should be looking to break in anyway.

"Go West Young Man."

OK, so it applies neither just to men nor to the west, but you might have to do some traveling to show your tape around. If you ever go inside a news director’s office, you will notice at least one pile of tapes sent by people just like you hoping to get looked at. There are simply too many for him or her to look at them all. If you can meet a news director in person, you will have a far greater chance of making an impression that he or she might remember when he or she next needs to hire someone.

Look at maps of your state and region and try plan trips to places that hire people straight out of school. These would be small towns whose stations don't pay much but give people with little or no experience a chance. Write to news directors of stations in those places telling them who you are and asking if they can spare 15 minutes to look at your tape when you’re going to be in their town. Follow up with a telephone call to the news director and politely ask if during such and such span of time when you’re going to be in their neighborhood if you could visit the station and show him or her your tape.

That’s how I got my first job. Before a trip to Ocean City, Maryland, which is about 30 miles from Salisbury, which has two TV stations, I called the news directors at each station. One agreed to see me and I set a specific time to see her, while the other put me off, telling me to "call me when you get in town." I did and he said he would see me, too.

Both news directors liked my tape and asked me to contact them from time to time in case they got an opening. I did. And that news director who originally put me off? Three months after we met, he hired me.

Remember to target your trips to stations that are likely to hire a recent college graduate. Even if you get a news director in a large market to visit with you, he or she’s not going to hire you then and he or she’s probably not going to still be there by the time you have enough experience to work in a big market. Sure, feedback from anyone can never hurt, but if you have to drive 200 miles just so some hotshot news director will pat you on the head and say, "Nice tape, kid. You might have a future in this business," don’t waste the gas.

EXTRA POINTERS: PRACTICE READING AND WRITING

Here’s something I still do after more than 15 years in television that no one else I know does: PRACTICE. If you wanted to play professional basketball, you’d practice shooting wouldn’t you? Why not practice reading out loud? How else do you get better at it? Do you have a home video camera? When not shooting practice stories with it how about talking to it just like you were doing a live shot? You can even turn on the TV or the stereo to simulate the noise you’d have to contend with if you were doing a live shot from a chaotic accident scene or celebration.

Another thing you cannot do too much of when trying to make yourself a better reporter is to READ. Just like working out improves your body’s fitness, reading is like weightlifting for your brain. You’ll find that the more you read – whether it’s novels, newspapers, or magazines – the better your brain works. I know that sounds like elementary school advice but it’s something I didn’t figure out until after college when I noticed that all of my stories were beginning to sound the same. I found that the more good writing I read, the more good writing I wrote. You also want to read a good newspaper every day because the more you know about the world around you, the easier it will be to report on it.

If you have a computer, access to the internet and friends to correspond with via e-mail, you should consider yourself especially blessed because you have an easy way to practice television news’ most underrated and valuable skill: WRITING. Even if you don’t make it as an on-air reporter, you can always find a job in television if you can write good copy quickly. Ninety percent of all the words spoken in a TV newscast are READ from a WRITTEN script. While you must learn how to speak to a camera without a script, most of what you say will be written down. It’s imperative that you learn how to write clearly, quickly and creatively. That’s the thing that will separate not only your story from all the other things people could watch instead but it’s what will separate you from other people applying for the same job.

It is in television as it is in life: Practice and prepare and you will prosper.

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