Time cruises in the 1255, that is 1255 National Press Club Building which houses seven reporters making up bureaus for a number of papers. I work for
the Salt Lake Tribune, and am the third arm of two 28-year-old political junkies. Even though we're on the Utah clock, with my day starting at 10 and ending at 6, it doesn't take a whole lot to pass what you'd think would be a long afternoon. Time and life and people move so fast out here, and when you report on it from a newsroom, it's easy to get on a fast track.
There is something about waking up every day that has me really excited. I am finding myself rushing to bed at night, so I can get up and start my day at the bureau. What was apprehension and overwhelm has somehow turned over on its head, and I love being with the Tribune. Working with two 28-year-old frat mentalities is a blast, and going into an office full of still-young writers is indeed glorious. Slipping under the radar is not an option in this office, though. Knowing that under the frat-façade lies an extreme level of professionalism that expects just the same from me is like living under the KGB. They can wield their red-pencil power and I’m done for.
We have fun in here, but I am always aware that I am needing to perform, as they are. I am constantly keeping myself in check. Having that twinge of fear of getting hacked is actually proving to be sort of exhilarating, and I find myself looking ahead every morning as I make my 10-minute ride to the office. I am eager to be there should something come up. I find that I am trying to instill a level of confidence in me so that Matt and Tommy know I can be depended on. I think I owe it to them already, for I am finding the office is full of not only work lessons, but life lessons I am picking-up each day I spend there with everyone. For these lessons I owe them.
I want to tell you about a few experiences, the first being
my first piece to go in print in a major newspaper. It was a daily, but Tommy encouraged our editor to get it up on the web as soon as possible. It ran in the paper the next day. Those who got to read it should not have been fooled if it didn’t sound like me - it wasn’t. Matt stuck around until 7:30 p.m. that night so that he could let me write, read what I wrote, and then re-write what I wrote.
He called it "editing," I called it getting annihilated. Submitting a piece of creative work to someone else's judgment takes some time getting used to. Constructive criticism is hard. Nonetheless, I asked him to be honest, brutally honest, and the last words he said to me before he went to town on my piece were, "
Ok. Now you should not be offended by this or frightened or worried, because it isn't like that, but we're going to rework this, and by that I mean we're going to rewrite it so much that it won't even look like the same piece."
And we did.
Leaving work that day, late though it was, tired, heat struck from being on the Hill for 4 hours, hungry and embarrassed, I couldn't have felt better about that day. I got my first daily in a major newspaper, I was somehow able to come out of the coin hearing (my first piece was on the new national park quarter series bill) with the "salient details," as Matt called it, a skill you are either born with or doomed never to have. Style, structure, organization - it can all be taught and practiced, said Matt. If you can't pick out the important stuff, you're done. I did by his standards, so that's good.The rest will come with practice, and getting a feel for what my editor, Dan, looks for. That was the most reassuring advice I got from the day.
I can remember so well getting beat up every Monday in Professor Ciccone's journalism class at Notre Dame for being "too flowery." Every time Ciccone would get to my write-up, he'd laugh in my face point blank, in front of the whole class."Lindsey, Lindsey, Lindsey . . ." he'd say, "my favorite."
"Why the hell would you write this? HOW could you write this badly?" was what immediately followed. I could not dumb down my writing enough for that guy, and that day I wrote for him. Had I just sat down and wrote how I usually write - whatever comes off the top of my head - I might have spared my not-yet-tough skin some smarting. And so I said to Matt, "Can I do that, am I allowed to be flowery?"
"It's how you'll get a job," he said. "
You have to write to entertain."
The 2nd thing I want to tell you about is my experience at the job-cutting block a few weeks ago, when I ate lunch in the conference room with Matt, Tommy, and Anne, the lone writer for the Denver Post's D.C. Bureau.
The other 3 got laid-off over the last few months.
As I look around the office, I notice that six desks sit empty, not including mine - the unpaid intern's - all of which were once the office spaces of reporters and journalists. After lunch that same day, I sat in on an hour and a half conference meeting with some of the team back in Salt Lake. The Deseret News, the Trib's top competitor, just recently laid-off 30 employees. Because the papers share a lot of the printing, etc. between the paper's, and for other various reasons I don't quite understand, the Tribune is now faced with the opportunity to do the same thing. That day’s meeting served to reassure the members of Tommy and Matt's team that they were not getting laid-off . . . this time.
I asked how often these meetings happen, how often people are put under the cutting block. They said anymore they are sporadic, maybe every 2 months. My entire time out here, all I hear is "it's bad, real bad," and the first slice of advice I got from a reporter over in Salt Lake that day was to "GO TO LAW SCHOOL!" And the more I hear it, the more I don't want to go to law school - I want to go to "well, you're going to be poor but you asked for it" journalism school.
These guys have a blast here, and I realize few get the opportunities they do.
They. love. their. jobs. And I couldn't ask for much more than that. A loose schedule, passion every day for what I am doing, lots of change and activity, every day. I'm not sure why I should go into something like law school just to do it. Just to have a back-up?
This was one of the most important experiences I’ve had here, though. It forced me to ask myself the hard questions I was avoiding. I am trying to be realistic with myself. I've asked these guys to be honest with me, and I've thrown out questions at them like, "knowing what you know and having watched it all change, would you go in the business today, if you were in my shoes?" I think I am asking too much from them, though, because I've noticed that their answers are never exactly what I'm looking for. I feel like I need someone to tell me, definitively, whether or not I personally am not being a total idiot by doing this. I know that the second they do, though, I'd more likely laugh and do it anyway just to go the other way.
And so I debated a lot with myself that day. Am I not being realistic enough with myself, and being too audacious when in reality I know very little about what I am getting into? It's easy to hear "do what you love" when you're doing it and feeling good about it and not yet having to support yourself and others in the meantime, when you're not the one getting laid-off and on the threshold of unemployment.
Then Matt said everything I wanted and needed to hear, and more.
“Chances are, you won't be filthy rich, but you won't be poor either. You will be middle class though, and if you're OK with that, you'll be well-off," he said. Matt also said many people in the business struggle a lot with this, those who always have their eye on the money, the monetary glory and myth of the job. He also said there are times when he'll get to thinking about it, too, but is confronted then not with what he doesn't have, but with what he has.
"I'm 28 years old, I get to come in whenever I want, and I get to write about whatever I want," he said. "I make my own hours, I have no supervisors, I can talk to anyone in the world about really cool stuff, and my wife and I just bought our second house."Awesome.
I still often wonder at what cost one is willing to continue doing what one loves. At some point, did the journalists who were let go from this office wish they had gone into a business simply to avoid living in a month-by-month system in which you will eventually get let go? Is it wiser to sacrifice a little bit of that passion to guarantee financial stability - and just go to law school? Or do you choose to lower your head and keep on barreling through, hoping that 2 years from now a newer model will bring about better conclusions than things like "newspapers are dying - go to law school."
But I can feel myself starting to rally for this cause. Already the wheels are starting to click to life and instinctively brainstorming all the ways I am going to do this thing call journalism.
I feel like the last thing I need to hear out here is that it's a lost cause; because if it is, those very words are what are driving me right into it. If they really don't think I should do it, they should try to say something like, "THIS IS THE GREATEST THING EVER JOURNALISM IS THE EASIEST WAY TO GET THE BEST LIFE/CAREER/STANDARD OF LIVING IT'S A BLAST EVERYBODY SHOULD DO IT." I think that would get me out the door quicker than "you WILL get laid-off at some point," as it should for anybody! I'd like to know if this feeling is a legit passion for what I want my career to be, or if it's just naiveté and ego that is making me a little too idealistic for this reality.How do you know? Do you just do and decide at some point that you'll accept whatever it'll be? Do you just make the decision to go with the flow regardless? These are the questions I am faced with in this newsroom every day, and in class with Amos. John Donvan couldn’t throw these at me enough, and I brought up my fears one day to Tommy at work.Tommy: You're gonna hear that stuff because it'll shake people up, and it'll weed those people out who aren't serious about it. There are people who are just looking to get to the top, who don't really care about journalism. They just want the money and the image. And those are the people who are going to get frustrated in this business; and those are the people who need to get out before they even begin, because they won't be able to take the punch.I think it's kind of exciting. A totally new frontier on the horizon. Nobody knows what this thing is going to look like. My main editor in Salt Lake couldn't say enough in the meeting, "I don't know guys, I just don't know what's going to happen." I think the point is to still be around when people do know. It’s going somewhere, and at this point it’s a question of whether or not you’re up for the ride.
