...the other day, I met a friend who asked me why I decided to become a journalist.
This is a complicated question. I didn't grow up in a journalism family - my father believes that vocations can be passed down genetically, and is still waiting for me to take up a career in research science - and I didn't really think about journalism for a long, long time.
I always knew that I wanted to write. The summer I turned 16 I decided to write a novel, and I did it (in the sense that I wrote a coherent story of several hundred thousand words). It took me a little over 250 hours and there were times when each minute felt like a drop of blood, but I finished it. Then my computer crashed, and I lost most of the manuscript, which is probably just as well because the pieces I still have, when I ever go back and read them, are more embarrassing than my middle school diary. (sample quote: "Rae, sitting on her camel, wandered around the sand dune. It had a bump in it. The sand dune, not the camel.")
I applied at random to Northwestern's journalism school, got in and went. And it totally changed my direction in life. People told me that I'd get to interview people who did important things, see places most people had never imagined, etc.
What they did not tell me - not on purpose, I'm sure - is that journalism would teach me a lot about myself.
For starters, being a journalist taught me how to fake confidence. I don't know if I'm a naturally shy person - I've been back and forth on this pretty much my entire life - but I still remember the assignment that forced me to confront and expel all my inhibitions. I'd been assigned to write an opinion survey story (the kind of story where you interview several people about a subject and then write up the results of your informal survey) about the Terri Schiavo case. There are very few prospects less appealing than walking up to random strangers and asking them about their feelings regarding someone's right to die.
I ended up doing this assignment in an airport. I had just dropped my sister off for a flight, and decided to interview people who were waiting in the various lounges. Many of them did not appreciate being solicited. A few had great opinions on the subject but refused to let me print their names. A majority agreed to be interviewed and quoted. But learning to walk up to someone I didn't know, shake their hand and say, "Hi, I'm a journalist. Would you mind if I ask you a few questions about x?" is probably one of the most valuable life skills I've ever learned. Why? Because it goes against everything in my nature. I was the sort of kid who could barely muster the courage to sell Girl Scout cookies, and now I had to ask absolute strangers about extremely personal things. In a sense, it showed me what I was capable of.
Because of this, I've also learned a lot about confidence, mainly that even the most confident-seeming people are not confident all the time. That may seem intuitive, but it's not. I often come across people who make the mistake of thinking that a confidence person has no insecurities. I almost never assume that.
Being a journalist taught me that very, very few people really deal well with stress. I learned this in several crowded newsrooms a few hours before deadline. The human mind wasn't meant to deal with constant, unmitigated deadline pressure. Anyone who works in a deadline-oriented field and says they don't feel it is either A) lying or B) not working hard enough. The first time I had a front page story, I got so nervous I couldn't eat or sleep the night before. The next morning, I picked up the paper with such strong trepidation that I almost hurled. I was so nervous that I put the paper in my bag and took it to work. I finally read that story eight hours later; I was so nervous that there might have been some typo/error/etc.
I learned how to deal with that stress, but I also learned that there is such a thing as too much stress, and the people who don't admit that are the ones to watch out for, because they haven't been pushed to their limit yet.
It's taught me that every single person messes up. In journalism school, I got a failing grade every time I made a factual error on an assignment. In the real world, factual errors are far more critical, more embarrassing, and - especially if you write every day - inevitable. The key is to recover promptly and with grace. Being a journalist teaches you how to move on when you mess up, because you will mess up, and people will know, and you - the writer who messed it up - will feel like serious crap every time you see the article. Which will be often.
Journalism taught me that what I do, while interesting, is not the most important thing in the world. (It's surprising how many people in their 20s don't realize this, whether they're part of the 1% or the other 99%, it doesn't matter.) One of my favorite assignments was a book review I did of Somaly Mam's memoir. Mam was a former sex slave in Cambodia, and about halfway through her memoir I lost my faith in mankind utterly. It's the sort of book that makes you question both the existence of God and the general point of the human race (I am not being hyperbolic). And then I regained that faith. What Mam went through was inhuman and awful, and I won't try to diminish or justify it even as part of some grander scheme. But the fact that she survived - that she works so tirelessly for the rights of girls who are being tortured the way she was - the fact that she found it in her heart to forgive some of these torturers - is mind blowing. It showed me that a single person with a brave and generous heart can change the world completely. Whenever I feel like I'm doing something really phenomenal, I remember interviewing Somaly Mam and I know that my life is only one very small part of a very large struggle.
These days, as an editor, I write a lot less than I used to. I'll probably also write less in the future, thanks to a career shift I'm considering. But for these past few years, journalism has given me the kind of opportunities that I honestly wouldn't have found anywhere else, especially at the age that I had them.
I became a journalist because I happened to get into a good journalism school. But I stayed in the field because of all the things I mentioned above, and because it has honestly been exhilarating. People talk about the "decline of journalism" in the Internet age, but I can't believe in that. The final thing I've learned from journalism is that great stories are necessary to our existence and people will never stop wanting to write them or listen to them. (We, as content providers, just have to figure out where the money will come from.)
This is a complicated question. I didn't grow up in a journalism family - my father believes that vocations can be passed down genetically, and is still waiting for me to take up a career in research science - and I didn't really think about journalism for a long, long time.
I always knew that I wanted to write. The summer I turned 16 I decided to write a novel, and I did it (in the sense that I wrote a coherent story of several hundred thousand words). It took me a little over 250 hours and there were times when each minute felt like a drop of blood, but I finished it. Then my computer crashed, and I lost most of the manuscript, which is probably just as well because the pieces I still have, when I ever go back and read them, are more embarrassing than my middle school diary. (sample quote: "Rae, sitting on her camel, wandered around the sand dune. It had a bump in it. The sand dune, not the camel.")
I applied at random to Northwestern's journalism school, got in and went. And it totally changed my direction in life. People told me that I'd get to interview people who did important things, see places most people had never imagined, etc.
What they did not tell me - not on purpose, I'm sure - is that journalism would teach me a lot about myself.
For starters, being a journalist taught me how to fake confidence. I don't know if I'm a naturally shy person - I've been back and forth on this pretty much my entire life - but I still remember the assignment that forced me to confront and expel all my inhibitions. I'd been assigned to write an opinion survey story (the kind of story where you interview several people about a subject and then write up the results of your informal survey) about the Terri Schiavo case. There are very few prospects less appealing than walking up to random strangers and asking them about their feelings regarding someone's right to die.
I ended up doing this assignment in an airport. I had just dropped my sister off for a flight, and decided to interview people who were waiting in the various lounges. Many of them did not appreciate being solicited. A few had great opinions on the subject but refused to let me print their names. A majority agreed to be interviewed and quoted. But learning to walk up to someone I didn't know, shake their hand and say, "Hi, I'm a journalist. Would you mind if I ask you a few questions about x?" is probably one of the most valuable life skills I've ever learned. Why? Because it goes against everything in my nature. I was the sort of kid who could barely muster the courage to sell Girl Scout cookies, and now I had to ask absolute strangers about extremely personal things. In a sense, it showed me what I was capable of.
Because of this, I've also learned a lot about confidence, mainly that even the most confident-seeming people are not confident all the time. That may seem intuitive, but it's not. I often come across people who make the mistake of thinking that a confidence person has no insecurities. I almost never assume that.
Being a journalist taught me that very, very few people really deal well with stress. I learned this in several crowded newsrooms a few hours before deadline. The human mind wasn't meant to deal with constant, unmitigated deadline pressure. Anyone who works in a deadline-oriented field and says they don't feel it is either A) lying or B) not working hard enough. The first time I had a front page story, I got so nervous I couldn't eat or sleep the night before. The next morning, I picked up the paper with such strong trepidation that I almost hurled. I was so nervous that I put the paper in my bag and took it to work. I finally read that story eight hours later; I was so nervous that there might have been some typo/error/etc.
I learned how to deal with that stress, but I also learned that there is such a thing as too much stress, and the people who don't admit that are the ones to watch out for, because they haven't been pushed to their limit yet.
It's taught me that every single person messes up. In journalism school, I got a failing grade every time I made a factual error on an assignment. In the real world, factual errors are far more critical, more embarrassing, and - especially if you write every day - inevitable. The key is to recover promptly and with grace. Being a journalist teaches you how to move on when you mess up, because you will mess up, and people will know, and you - the writer who messed it up - will feel like serious crap every time you see the article. Which will be often.
Journalism taught me that what I do, while interesting, is not the most important thing in the world. (It's surprising how many people in their 20s don't realize this, whether they're part of the 1% or the other 99%, it doesn't matter.) One of my favorite assignments was a book review I did of Somaly Mam's memoir. Mam was a former sex slave in Cambodia, and about halfway through her memoir I lost my faith in mankind utterly. It's the sort of book that makes you question both the existence of God and the general point of the human race (I am not being hyperbolic). And then I regained that faith. What Mam went through was inhuman and awful, and I won't try to diminish or justify it even as part of some grander scheme. But the fact that she survived - that she works so tirelessly for the rights of girls who are being tortured the way she was - the fact that she found it in her heart to forgive some of these torturers - is mind blowing. It showed me that a single person with a brave and generous heart can change the world completely. Whenever I feel like I'm doing something really phenomenal, I remember interviewing Somaly Mam and I know that my life is only one very small part of a very large struggle.
These days, as an editor, I write a lot less than I used to. I'll probably also write less in the future, thanks to a career shift I'm considering. But for these past few years, journalism has given me the kind of opportunities that I honestly wouldn't have found anywhere else, especially at the age that I had them.
I became a journalist because I happened to get into a good journalism school. But I stayed in the field because of all the things I mentioned above, and because it has honestly been exhilarating. People talk about the "decline of journalism" in the Internet age, but I can't believe in that. The final thing I've learned from journalism is that great stories are necessary to our existence and people will never stop wanting to write them or listen to them. (We, as content providers, just have to figure out where the money will come from.)
What would be your take on unabashed bias which exists in some segments of journos and the innate tendency to sensationalize issues and gain grownie points?
ReplyDelete