Designed to teach students how to gather, write, and edit news stories, The Complete Reporter discusses the techniques that are used every day in the news business. Through a combination of descriptive text, examples, demonstrations, and exercises, this book makes fundamental concepts clear while instilling task-specific news and feature story writing skills.

Along with introducing students to basic discussions about the field of reporting and basic writing, editing, and design skills, this text provides them with key guidelines and tips for writing general and specialty stories (see Parts IV-VII).

Practical exercises throughout each chapter give students experience with realistic writing situations. Based on actual newspaper articles, the exercises present a series of reporter's notes prepared at the scene of a story. Usable facts, libelous and/or unethical statements, and trivial tidbits are lumped together in order to test and help build students' judgment skills - and their ability to create tightly woven stories from a jumble of information.