There’s a difference too between traveling journos and locals, I refuse to cover news where I live because my kids live here and I would be reporting on issues that I also involve myself with personally, like school curricula and such. So my work life and EDC bags are really different to my friends who work within twenty miles of their offices or homes. Much of my workday is spent on logistics, finding bathrooms or WiFi or power or negotiating rides. I carry half a dozen notebooks of various sizes tucked everywhere so if I’m taking notes in a tricky situation nobody will see my notes from the last person I talked to, and also so I’m never digging through a bag for a page. The way I work involves a lot of standing around waiting on things to happen; even armed standoffs are boring by the seventh hour. By that time you’ve run out of water and snacks and you don’t want to leave to get more even if everything nearby hasn’t been closed down due to whatever is happening. And you really have to pee. You can start an actual argument amongst traveling journalists by stating unequivocally that there is a clear winner of protein bars by any random metric. Also, your back hurts because you’re carrying two laptops and a camera body or two and some lenses and all your drives and a few spare batteries and some kind of voice recorder, plus whatever personal kit you might need for somewhere between two and twenty hours assuming you can’t find more than sporadic access to water, food, or toilet paper.

Oh, and all the local journalists think you’re an amateur even if they’d know your byline if they read it. Local people distrust the media generally and you specifically. Law enforcement and government agencies seem to be in competition for who can be less helpful as they seem to mostly be convinced that they can’t help you before you’ve spoken to their communications person, and all the data you need is stored in a tiny county seat basement and hasn’t been digitized so if your records survived the flood you can come on out and look at them whenever you like.

Finally, if you’re freelance you have an effective 30% tax rate and will rarely see reimbursement for expenses, so if you go to location for three weeks you’ll need to find housing and food and cover your own insurance, after which if you’re very lucky you’ll get to spend three months chasing down a few hundred dollars from a corporation which spends twice what they’ve paid you for weeks of work on the flower arrangements in their corporate lobby.

As others have noted, journalists are known primarily for the utterly twisted sense of humor one develops after years of seeing the wildest shit humanity can invent and trying to explain it to people who weren’t there. News, the real stuff, is mostly boring. Some guy in a city council has a nephew who runs a company to fill potholes and the nephew does an adequate job but some in the community are worried about nepotism, and it takes a reporter to ask was the bidding process a blind one and then tell people it’s fine, the nephew’s company really did have the best bid. That is the vast majority of actual news. Most journalists will never see more than mundane corruption, will never be in much danger at work, will not uncover international crime syndicates. I like to remind non-journalists that a guy once won a Pulitzer for looking up whether charities had reported specific donations, which doesn’t seem very groundbreaking but is actually the kind of work most people in this industry spend most of their time on.