Chapter 76: A Very Formative Year
Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.
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I got into journalism not because I aspired to be a journalist but simply because I couldn’t think of any other skills I had the potential to excel in besides writing, reading and editing. In elementary school, I wrote poetry for fun and brought books to recess so I didn’t have to play Star Wars with the other kids. As I got older, I looked over my parents’ email drafts to teachers and edited them before they were sent out. In high school, my best grades were in English and literature. I never had much of an interest in math or science. I wasn’t very good at them either.
The summer before my freshman year at Sarah Lawrence began, I had to select my top choices for my “First Year Studies” course. This was important because these classes lasted a full year, and the professor who taught the unit you were in became your “don” for the next four years. (We were loosely based on the Oxford system.) There was a long list of subjects to choose from – there was dance, theater, science or literature and of course, writing. I immediately gravitated toward anything writing-related; checking off fiction writing and poetry and journalism and a couple of literature courses as my top choices. Of course, I ended up getting placed in the intro to journalism course.
I had not done much journalism before, save for a couple of mock newspapers I wrote up when I was a pre-teen. Most were sent to my friend who had recently moved to Germany, and they served as short updates on how her guinea pig, who had stayed behind with my family in New York, was doing. The thought of doing real journalism, the kind where you’re doing a lot more than interviewing a guinea pig, scared me. As I’ve written before in this newsletter, I’ve always been very shy and journalism seemed like it involved a whole lot of talking.
I think what happened my freshman year is a testament to the power of good teachers and luck and also, thankfully, having a little bit of talent. My journalism professor, early on, told me I was doing well in class and made it clear that I had potential. He encouraged and championed me and made me feel enthusiastic about journalism, made me believe in my own skill. In turn, I flourished. I gained confidence. I came to class excited. I daydreamed about one day writing for The New Yorker. In class, we wrote profiles and features and longform stories. When spring came around, my professor suggested that I apply for an internship at the Norwood News.
I’d never heard of the Norwood News before; most of you probably haven't. It’s a small bi-weekly community paper based in the Norwood neighborhood of the Bronx. The paper focuses on covering events that affect Norwood – crime, community board meetings, elections, business development, just about anything local. At the time, it had one full-time staffer, the editor-in-chief. The paper relied on freelancers and volunteers and unpaid interns to keep running. In the summer of 2013, I became one of those unpaid interns.
On the morning of my very first day, the editor-in-chief instructed me to leave the office, walk two blocks south and snoop around. An older woman had been murdered there the previous night, and he wanted me to gather any details I could. He told me to talk to neighbors, cops, whoever was there. He handed me a camera to take pictures and I was off to report my first story.
At the Norwood News, I usually worked on five to six stories per week. Most of them were breaking news stories that I would report, write up and publish in the span of a day. But I also got the opportunity to write about dramatic community board meetings, profiles of aspiring politicians running for open assembly seats and investigative pieces on Bronx congressmen's outside jobs and earnings. My work made the front page several times.
That internship is still the best job I’ve ever had in journalism. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the one that I enjoyed the most or would recommend to others. But it was the most valuable learning experience I’ve had in journalism. It was the intensive journalism bootcamp that I needed, similar to the one I had many years later in graduate school, except I didn’t have to pay thousands of dollars for it and I was getting real bylines every week. There’s a reason why the Norwood News was still an entry on my resume several years after I interned there – I couldn’t get the same experience anywhere else, the same responsibilities. Of course, there were cons: It was unpaid. If I hadn’t been from New York, I wouldn’t have been able to afford New York City housing for a summer. If I hadn’t saved up money from my work study job at college, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to eat and travel all over the Bronx.
Experiences at small newspapers can be so valuable to aspiring journalists because they allow us to actually be a reporter. There’s no getting coffee or making photocopies or transcribing interviews for other people. But not everyone has the luxury of taking an unpaid position (do they still exist?). And unfortunately, many local newspapers have no budget to pay interns, even if they want to. And so many of these local papers are dying. And they are very much needed by the communities they cover. I don’t have an answer for how to solve any of these serious issues.
As I reflect back on how I got into this field to begin with, it’s really dawning on me how circumstantial it maybe was. What if I had been placed in a fiction class, in a romantic poetry course? What if I hated my journalism professor? Would I have gotten an MFA? Would I now be writing for a fiction newsletter? I joke, but who knows? It’s been kind of a wild ride, this last decade of navigating a journalism world. But I take comfort in knowing that none of the things I excel at would have made me a lot of money, unless I made it big. It wasn’t ever journalism or business or journalism or medicine. It was always writing and editing and sitting here with my thoughts, wondering when and how I’ll make it, like really make it.
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