beat contributor, beat writer

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2007 at 11:51:27AM +0100, Milo?? Komar??evi?? wrote:
> I'm not a native English speaker nor a beat contributor, but the way I
> understand, "beats" are smallest logical bits/short sections of the
> release notes, like e.g a "beat" on Xorg, a "beat" on the kernel, etc.

"beat" also has other meanings - for example with policemen a "beat" is the
area they walk and deal with.

In the case of journalists (which is the one we want) its used in the same way
to mean a writer assigned to a specific item. A beat writer might for example
be assigned to "report every Manchester United football game", and that is
all they would do. His/her job is to know everything (and everyone) around that
specific topic.