(Don't) Read All About It

When I was in college and still searching for a possible career I settled on journalism for one single reason: It was the only thing I was half-decent at and that I could do with a history major.
So, after I was graduated from a small school in Michigan I set out to find a job. It was weird, but the large metro papers didn't seem to be interested in a recent graduate with little experience. Crazy.

I finally got a few freelancing gigs. One was for the Detroit News sports section. At the time it was the coolest job I could possibly think of. I was tasked with covering the AAU Junior Olympics that were in the Detroit Metro area that summer. Basically I was assigned to write two 15-inch stories a day for a week. I nearly lost my shit, since I had only ever worked at a weekly and never on deadline.

But, I tried. My first day I went to a baseball game where this kid from New Hampshire threw a no-hitter, and it was like the eigth one he had throw in Little League and high school. Easy story there. The next one was at a basketball game where I found this team that had been together so long that the "coach remembered when he had to talk to the team about sucking their thumbs."

Fuck. I was in love with journalism. I loved telling stories. I loved interviewing people. I loved it all. My mentor, who got me the News job, said she heard all kinds of compliments about my writing. I say that, not to boast or anything, but because I really, really didn't think I had any idea what I was doing.

A few months after that I landed a full-time job at the local weekly. I was prolific that year, writing something like 400 stories. I pissed people off because I didn't subscribe to their "the local weekly should be a P.R. piece" mentality, and won a few fans.

That lasted a year when a daily paper in a city near Ann Arbor that I was freelancing for brought me on full time. I was stoked. No, it wasn't the Times or the Post, but it was a daily. For me, who really had little journalism experience and came from a very small school, it was the tits.

My enthusiasm for the job lasted a while, but as is common with young journalists today I quickly became disenfranchised with the bullshit. For one, the editor in chief was an idiot dedicated more to not pissing people off than to revealing the truth. That didn't jibe with me.

A year into the gig I switched to covering the police beat. This reenergized me. It was fucking great. I loved knowing all the shit first, building cop sources and reading other great crime writing that came from daily newspapers, new and old. (If you ever want to read some of the grittiest, most amazing crime writing, search for Edna Buchanan, who wrote for the Miami Herald during the early 1980's when the drug wave invaded that town.)

But two things happened that year:

1.) I kind of fell into a little bit of a paranoid depression. I read somewhere that when you're a cops reporter, and cover enough tragedy -- like fatal car wrecks and four....FOUR....people being killed by trains in a month -- you start to wonder how soon you may bite it. Plus, the cops showed me the pictures of the train victims to gross me out, and I didn't eat for two days. And there's only so many 5-year-old girls you can see pulled out of the water in a body bag before you get depressed. My limit was one.

2.) I realized something. Most newspapers are never going to change. Unfortunately it's a dying industry. There is so much amazing writing out there at bigger papers. And they are doing an excellent job bringing multi-media presentations to the internet and taking advantage of all the luxuries online reporting affords. But, for so many others all they want is shorter stories. At least that was the mantra at my paper. Instead of focusing on quality writing, they wanted shorter everything, and completely raped the newspaper of the one advantage it had over other media, the ability to provide context.

Some reporters, and amazing writers, I met last winter encouraged me to find another paper. They promised it wasn't like that everywhere. But by that point I didn't have it in me. I was done.

So, I took a job in Washington DC after meeting my future boss in a bar. It was an easy decision. But I do miss journalism. Some of the people I met at the paper are some of the best, most dedicated people I know.

And I hope they stick with it, journalism needs all the talent it can get.