Fame
Most news reporters spend their days assigned to cover county fairs, local legislation, and arrests outside of corner liquor stores. There are a rare and famous few, however, who made it big; whose names became nationally (or even internationally) recognized because they had a talent, not only for reporting, but for sniffing out a really juicy scoop.
Take Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. In 1972, Bernstein was a college dropout covering local news stories for the Washington Post. He had years of experience in the newspaper business, unlike Woodward, who had graduated from Yale and served in the U.S. Navy, but was new to journalism.
In the summer of 1972, Woodward and Bernstein were tasked with covering a break-in at the Watergate office building, home of the Democratic National Committee. What Bernstein and Woodward uncovered—and reported—over the next two years eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The book the two news reporters wrote about the Watergate scandal, entitled All the President's Men, was turned into a movie in 1976, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford.