Field Reporting

As the name suggests, a field report is a work of journalism that covers breaking news beyond the confines of your own office. It is the coverage of a news story in its location. You, the field reporter or correspondent, are part of a press team sent to actually attend and report on a major event unfolding in real-time while also obtaining firsthand accounts from other attendees. 

As a member of the press, it is your job to document and report on location whether physically or digitally, near or far. Outputs of field reporting generally include live broadcasts or comprehensive news articles.

Real-life Examples

Research, research, research

Whether it be its contents, themes, or key people involved, prior research of the event you'll report on is absolutely necessary. You wouldn’t want to go in it blind without a clue about what to expect, right? 

Find out what specific concepts the event will tackle. Ask yourself what exactly is the significance this event will have in a sea of other similar incidents. Dig around to find what makes this event in particular newsworthy to your audience — the student body. Also, research to know who are the key people involved: their background, their position, their knowledge of the event, and even their conversational style.

Further, knowing these details can help you formulate several interview questions that go beyond superficial queries that ask things from the surface level. You can craft more thought-provoking and rounded questions that look into specifics thanks to research. It provides more nuanced perspectives on the event while creating your field report.

Logistics

When it comes to necessities to bring, field reporters often carry around a recording device, pens, a notebook, and a laptop for article drafting. Your accompanying photojournalists often carry professional cameras for visual documentation. All press team members are encouraged to bring press IDs for easy identification by event organizers, as well as to be granted special permission to places typically reserved for event organizers themselves.

Photojournalism

In a live setting, photographers are commonplace in press teams. Referred to as photojournalists, they take pictures of major developments unfolding or key people speaking. Photojournalists capture the key moments of a certain incident and give a visual guide for readers, telling them the story from an optical perspective. In fact, some of the best photojournalists have the ability to tell a story with only their photographs.

The Mover has a specialized team of photojournalists that are part of the Social Media Department. You can either tap a photojournalist to help you while live reporting, or an editor or the Social Media Head will assign you a group of photographers who’ll accompany you. Establish rapport with them as much as you can, for you will be coordinating with them on what shots best tell the story you’re reporting on. You can also let them be on their own terms, with you the reporter ultimately deciding which photos make it to publication.

Formulating interview questions

Field reporting is never complete without the interviews. More than just broadcasting what’s happening, getting to know the personal insights of an event’s attendees gives a more rounded, fleshed-out overview of what exactly is transpiring. To put it simply, interviews give another perspective to an event than just what you observed. They can be event heads, people who took part in an activity, or random audience individuals. When conducting one-on-one engagements, proper etiquette is a must for a conducive interview to happen, and this section delves right into how.

For further elaboration on how to prepare, act, and document interviews, read this chapter on Conducting an Interview wholly dedicated to orchestrating fruitful sessions.

Informing the interviewee

We wouldn’t want our key interviewees to suddenly be grabbed away from the scene and feel unprepared to answer our questions, nor do we want them to feel like they’re in a police interrogation, right? Hence, it is crucial that before asking any interview question, you must preface what you’re doing and why. You are a field reporter covering this specific event and you wish to conduct a recorded interview to gain their insights on behalf of The Mover’s press team. You’re not here to perform an inquisition of whodunnit. 

Personally and cordially approach the person you want to interview. It’s a big no-no to catch them while they’re preoccupied with other duties; ensure that your ideal interviewee is not attending to highly-important matters. If the event has already elapsed or if you cannot locate your person of interest, you may genially email them your request. If you know your eyed interviewee’s contact information on other platforms or perhaps know them already on said platforms, you can ask for their consent there.

Should in case they decline your invitation or do not reply to your email, don’t feel disheartened; you may feel free to ask as many other people as you like until you’ve obtained the information you need. 

Special Note: Though ambush interviews, an approach to interview via sudden interruption, has often been done by real-life news companies, The Mover highly discourages this practice on the journalistic principles of sensitivity and mutual respect of the interviewees.

While interviewing 

Depending on your and your interviewee’s preference, your actual interview can occur in the location of the actual event/happening, or in a secluded area so that both of you can have a concentrated thinking environment. If they opt to do a live, recorded interview in either location, properly introduce yourself again and the reason for pulling them into an interview. Talk about casual stuff real quick first; they’re just about as nervous as you are. 

Be sure to record the entire session, whether it be through a video recording (carefully position your voice so that you may take note of certain facial/body expressions) or an audio recording. An extra recording device such as another phone would act as a great contingency if in case some media was not properly captured. 

Once you reach the interview proper, feel as if you’re engaging in a conversation and not acting as a test examiner — do not opt to ask your questions in list form. Let the transition be natural; talk about the response your interviewee just made and let it sieve into your next question. That way, both you and your interviewee have each others’ minds eased.

When the interviewee makes pauses in the middle of a response, it’s best not to interrupt them. Allow them the time to think out their response; more interesting information will likely spew out if you let them be. Moreover, if you forget a question or have a new question in mind, don’t be afraid to ask it. If it’s for the sake of completely gaining the person’s insights, ask ahead! The only thing stopping you would be time itself.

Once you asked all your questions and gained the information you needed, say thank you to your interviewee for taking the time to participate in this exchange. Assure them that even if some of their words won’t be directly quoted in the field report itself, what they mentioned has been a great help in completing it.

In-text interviews

There would be times when the people you ask to conduct an interview with would decline to do it live due to scheduling conflicts or a general lack of time. With that in mind, you can always opt to ask if they may do an in-text interview instead. 

In any convenient messaging platform, you may simply type down your question/s for them to answer after prefacing your purpose of interviewing. If they decide to respond on a separate file, they may. Think of it as similar to the reflection questions you’d answer every homeroom, where the prompt is already given and the interviewee will just jot down their thoughts on it. Once they sent you their responses, thank and assure them as previously mentioned.

Press Conferences

Once you’ve gathered all your data after a period of field reporting, it’s now time to report back to The Mover all the events that transpired, insights that were spoken, and screenshots that you captured. This process is primarily done in three ways:

Live Reports

Live reporting online in The Mover involves Instagram stories that broadcast what’s happening and what people think about it. If you are assigned to do live reporting, you must always keep in touch with the Social Media Department of this publication. Not only will they design a story template for your reporting, but also attach any snippets you send them from the event in the form of Just In, Breaking, and ATM posts.

Through The Mover’s messaging platforms or your own direct messages, inform the SocMed Manager in charge of creating the Instagram story formats on the newest updates. You can send them screenshots of the event, descriptions of what’s developing, quotations from speakers, and short interview responses. This process can be done the whole day or until the event ends

You may take a look at the live reporting story of highlights on The Mover's official Instagram page  for more references.

News Articles

Writing news articles for The Mover involves the need of knowing proper news structures and disseminating newsworthy info. Unlike live reports, articles don’t come out immediately after something happens, nor does information arrive in a staggered and gradual form. Instead, a complete and concise retelling is published with the most significant information highlighted over others. The actual news article may be published a few days after the event — following The Mover’s Monday & Friday posting schedule — until around a month after it elapsed for timeliness to be accounted for.

If you were designated to write down news coverage, one necessarily has to have an adequate understanding of how to write news. You may read these syllabus chapters on the Anatomy of a News Article, Types of Articles, and Article Structures as guides. 

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