It’s easy to work a wire service job by coming in at your appointed hour, working hard all day long on interpreting poorly written press releases and security filings, and then leaving, not to think again about the grind until you return to it.

But the best reporters bring what Americans often call “hustle,” the idea that you can take the predatory nature of the pool hall shark and combine it with the Protestant work ethic and once you mix it with journalism, gradually get to the point where you break news.

When you are a wire service reporter, you can work your fingers to the bone on busywork all day long. You can feel like you’ve accomplished a lot, when what you’ve really done is tired yourself out by rewriting PR copy.

The people we cover in companies news know that this has been our role for years. They know that the prestige and glory of big stories usually go to more prestigious competitors — the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times. Bloomberg certainly resents that idea, and has spurred its reporters to hustle more. So have we.

The first step that a reporter at a wire service can take to get beyond that notion — we just write things, while others break things — is to see the difference between working hard like a machine all day and working hard like a journalist.

The first step in hustle-ocity (is that a word that will stick? I doubt it) is no longer thinking of yourself as a machine, but as a human trying to interact with other humans to get them to tell you things. It means crossing the sound barrier that you’ve defined for yourself and thinking: if I ask the right people often enough what’s going on, I’ll learn things before companies decide to say things officially. When you do that for the first time, you have broken news.

You might spend all month chasing one big tip, and then you get it and publish it and you feel great. You worked a hell of a lot harder than when you wrote up five stories to an update 2 each day that were based on press releases. The former is an example of real calories. The latter is an example of empty calories.

There are ways to begin to tap into that feeling, that addiction of being a hustler:

- Calling people when you don’t have to, just so you can get to know them and understand what they think about the issues you cover.

- Reading EVERYTHING that you can by your competitors to get beyond what they’re saying and break new ground in news or in thought.

- Keeping a detailed log of everyone you speak to.

- Always asking them who else you should be talking to.

- Formulating over and over the way you would tell your friends outside the business world or the media what you did today, and ensuring that they find it interesting.

There are more ways, of course, but mostly this is a mindset. Are you in journalism to rewrite bad writing all day long? Or are you there to tell the simple story even before the official news gets announced? Doing the former is not easy, but it’s easier than you think.