Note, with love, to my soon-to-graduate Baby Js:

 It’s that time of year when you can no longer ignore the Real World rushing your way. Funny how it always seems to catch you by surprise. Of course, Christmas and Mother’s Day always seem to catch newsrooms by surprise, and I get tripped up every March by the looming tax-filing deadline. So I’ll cut you some slack.

The hustlers among you already have locked in summer internships or first jobs. But that thin thread of security doesn’t ease your larger anxiety: What do you need to do to succeed? Or perhaps better put, how do you get to do what you really want to do, and do it as soon as possible?

The question opens many discussion doors, depending on the room you want to walk into. Work ethic and patience and the dreaded dues-paying. Openness to geographies and cultures you never would have considered. Discipline, flexibility and no small dash of coding skills. Cleaning out the beer-party pictures from your social media accounts. Maybe even a recalibration of what it is you think you really want to do.

But for those of you who want to report and write – to find your way as a journalistic writer of whatever stripe – I suggest you park your ultimate aspirations (music critic, celebrity food blogger, long-form magazine writer, Red Sox beat reporter, foreign correspondent) down the road aways and spend a couple years stubbing your toes on what I think of as the Five Essential Beats. A solid grounding in them sets you up with the skills to do any story, at any level, once you’re ready. You will roll your eyes with boredom at some. But they will teach you how the world works, how to navigate that world, and how to draw on reporting and writing tools that you will use again and again. Skip learning these basics and you’ll likely find yourself having to loop back around for a refresher course.

So here’s my graduation gift to you ~ The Five Essential Beats:

GOVERNMENT. It doesn’t matter if it’s the city council or county commission or state Legislature. Spend some time figuring out how our core civic governing bodies work – or fail to work. From public records to politics to power plays, this is a must.

COPS & COURTS. Another essential branch of the civic world. (Note I said “civic,” not “civil.”) It not only reveals how our complex justice systems function, but provides experience with fast-paced deadline reporting, street reporting and the oft-problematic dynamic between law, perps and victims.  Seldom pretty, but oh so real.  Want to be a war correspondent someday?  Cover cops.  Want to cover the Supreme Court for the NYTimes.  Start with local courts.

BUSINESS. Business is arguably a bigger factor than even government in how our societies work and how people live. That’s because money is the tail wagging most every other dog. Covering the multi-faceted beast that is business requires some fundamental knowledge of how to ferret out public and non-public information, how to navigate jargon and spin, how to bring common-sense math to your reporting, how to see the world through the perspectives of boss, worker, regulator and consumer.

OBITS. Much as you might cringe at this, it really is the best way to learn to write profiles, and to approach and interview people during tender times. The lessons are endless, but three stand out:

• Don’t be afraid of emotion.
• Don’t be an asshole.
• Don’t misspell names.

THE STATE FAIR. This is my stand-in-term for any of those general assignment “color” pieces you’ll be sent out to do. They range from the festival of the week to descriptive scenes from sporting events or major disasters. They are too often shrugged off as a notebook dump of quotes and fly-by descriptions. But learning to do them well means learning the core elements of strong narrative storytelling: focus, setting, character, telling detail, action, dialog, emotion.

This is far from an exhaustive list. It’s missing missing education, religion, social issues, environment, science and medicine, the arts. For that matter, it’s missing weather coverage.

But I’ll stand with those five as the fundamentals. Separately and together they offer lessons and experiences you will find yourself drawing on to get and rock that dream job.  Not tomorrow, but sooner than you think.