When journalist Sara Murphy began freelancing in 2020, she enjoyed being a generalist. She wrote personal essays on financial freedom, features about pet custody laws and deep dives into the Future Farmers of America. Then last year, an unexpected beat found her: Hurricane Helene.
She lived near the devastation in the Western North Carolina region, and once she was safe and had cellphone service, she was reporting on the ground. It’s been her beat for a year now.
“I couldn’t plan for it and I had no idea it was coming, but I took the opportunity to report, because I was there, and it opened up so many avenues,” said Murphy, who has published hurricane pieces in AARP, The Charlotte Observer and The Guardian, among others. “The majority of the stories I’ve done are Helene-related stories, and even the ones that aren’t Helene-related branched off of Helene-related stories.”
Carving out a beat can take many forms on many different platforms, from queer pop culture newsletters to tech columns in traditional newspapers. But building credibility in a particular beat takes time — and, if you stick with it, can lead to steady, and sometimes unexpected, work.
“On a beat, you cannot fake it till you make it,” NBC News business and data correspondent Brian Cheung said. “You have to know what you’re talking about. And so, for that reason, you’re getting really familiar with the topics by talking to as many people as you can.”
I spoke to several journalists who have both traditional and untraditional beats across platforms. Here are their tips for building expertise on a particular topic.
Embrace personal interests
While in college at Syracuse University, Cheung double-majored in broadcast journalism and finance — two topics he was interested in but wasn’t sure he could ever meld. Now in his role as a business and data correspondent at NBC News, he breaks down complex financial concepts for audiences who don’t have an innate interest in Wall Street or degrees in economics.
“You need to translate what can be an arcane topic into something that people will want to be dialed into by explaining to them why this matters,” he said. “Inflation and the Federal Reserve don’t really resonate with people, but credit card borrowing rates and the cost of living do.”
Longtime social media director and manager Erika Abdelatif, who worked at outlets like Bustle and Her Campus, didn’t really have a beat until she started talking with her college friend Kristen Myers about the decision to be married and child-free.
Their interest turned into their popular podcast “Dinky” — inspired by the acronym DINK, meaning “dual income, no kids” — garnering over 100,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 28,000 on TikTok. Over the past three years, they became sought-after experts in the DINK space and have been featured in The Oregonian, Oregon Public Broadcasting and The Newsette.
While it’s not a traditional beat, Abdelatif has embraced how she and Myers’ deeply researched and conversational approach to the topic has resonated with fans and created a platform, which includes a Patreon and an active Discord.
“For a long time, I didn’t know what my thing was that I cared deeply about,” Abdelatif said. “I would advise people to look at what’s the thing that, with your friends, you literally cannot shut up about? And lean into that.”
Cultivate strong sources
Murphy originally wanted to become a literature professor, earning a doctorate from Columbia University. While that didn’t work out, her doctorate gave her perspective on what it takes to be an expert in a field — and how crucial expert sources are to beat reporting.
“One of the things that I find freelancers will worry about is, ‘Am I an expert?’” she said. “Your job is to find the experts and have them explain the really important things that you need. What makes you an expert in your beat is knowing who to call and knowing what to focus on in a given situation.”
But building those relationships with sources doesn’t happen after one phone call — reporters need to regularly stay in touch and check in with sources to build trust.
“It takes years to get acquainted with someone such that they feel comfortable with you as a journalist to talk to you openly about what’s going on,” said Cheung, who writes articles for NBC News, reports packages for “TODAY” and co-hosts the NBC News podcast “Here’s the Scoop.” “I had to show up in so many conference rooms in Washington, D.C., before I could get acquainted with the regulators and bankers to get the confidence to ring them up and ask, ‘Hey, do you like this change?’”
Be nimble to the evolution of the beat
Freelance journalist Mara Santilli started her career at women’s health magazines like Marie Claire and Shape. As the political landscape changed, so did her beat — she now covers women’s reproductive health, building on the sources she made over the years.
“There are just so many different topics and subtopics within women’s reproductive health that I never get tired,” she said. “I don’t ever feel I’ve reached the end of the line here.”
While Santilli’s beat has narrowed over time, some reporters have embraced how their beat has broadened. In the year since Hurricane Helene hit, Murphy’s coverage hasn’t just been limited to covering the immediate aftermath, but has expanded to include long-term issues such as how the natural disaster affected insurance, child care and the food industry.
“I ended up writing on early childhood education, which is something I’ve never done and that’s actually become a quasi-focus,” she said. “Food writing is the last thing I would ever want to do, and suddenly, I did a ton of, like, restaurant writing, because it was all about what was happening to the industry after the storm.”
Prior to NBC News, Cheung worked at Yahoo Finance and the trade publication S&P Global Market Intelligence. Now at a large mainstream outlet, he covers not only interest rates and bank regulation, but also tech happenings, like the recent releases of the new Apple iPhone and the Nintendo Switch 2.
“My path is a little unique in that, as I’ve made every move, I’ve gotten more generalist,” he said. “It’s challenging me in a different way, because I get to do all these types of stories that I haven’t done in the past. I’m trying to wrap my head around more companies and subjects, but I’m still covering the economy.”
Engage with your beat outside of journalism
Part of building beat expertise also means engaging with the beat outside of journalism. Cheung’s first post-college job was as an analyst at the Federal Reserve. While working as a journalist, he also received a master’s degree in applied economics from Johns Hopkins University.
“Having been inside the Federal Reserve, it was enormously helpful for my institutional knowledge of how it works,” he said. “It did afford me a lot of connections within the central bank that a lot of other journalists didn’t have.”
As Santilli built up her expertise in reproductive health, she planned to write a book, which led her to go back to school, eventually pursuing a master’s degree in the history of science and medicine at Yale University.
“The whole academic experience has been a shift in the same way that I’m writing, reading and thinking,” she said. “It’s definitely a challenge, but it helps kind of ground some of the topics that I’ve already been writing about in more research.”
