help with an English sentence

[Kenny同志]

Came across this sentence (highlighted in yellow) while working on the last paragraph of the last chapter.  What does it mean? The author didn't mention any writers or scorers in the previous texts so to me it's kind of out of place. Any ideas?

 

[imron]

In journalism circles a 'beat', is a particular area that an author might cover - e.g. if you always cover football, then football is your beat.  If you always cover politics, then politics is your beat.

 

A beat writer is therefore a writer who is covering a specific beat - in this case the beat is going to be baseball.  Therefore in this context a 'veteran beat writer' is a journalist who has been covering and writing about baseball games for a long time.  At any given baseball game, there will be several of these (one for each major newspaper) and none of them had seen a crowd like this.

[Kenny同志]

Didn't know beat meant that. Thanks Imron.

[Shelley]

It can also be used to describe a particular area a policeman covers on his daily walk around the city.

 

Example: The policeman got sore feet from trudging round his beat.

 

Police are often described as "being on the beat"

 

This might help;

 

1. 3.

   an area allocated to a police officer and patrolled on foot.

   "his beat was in North London"

   synonyms: circuit, round, course, route, way, path, orbit, tour, turn

   "a policeman on his beat"

   • a spell of duty allocated to a police officer.

     "his beat ended at 6 a.m"
   • an area regularly frequented by someone.

     "a few, new to their beat, looked at him with interest"
   • informal

     a person's area of interest.

     "his beat is construction, property, and hotels"
   • a stretch of water fished by an angler.

     "you don't necessarily have to fish on the priciest beats to find good sport"

 

 

[Kenny同志]

Thanks Shelly. Sounds like what 片區 refers to in mainland Chinese. : )