Laura and I spent the summer traveling, and when we got back I decided to continue pursuing a career in writing. (My trip renewed, to some extent, my desire to go into academia, though I’ll go into that later).
I enjoy writing and have been told I am good at it (though not necessarily when I’m blogging), so I briefly explored writing opportunities in Utah. Laura, after all, has a job she really likes in American Fork, Utah, so we had an incentive to stay.
After looking around for a while, however, I decided that there just weren’t many opportunities in Utah, either for jobs or simply to make contacts in the field. I met some cool people during my search, and began writing freelance for the Daily Herald, but nothing that had any long-term prospects.
So, by mid fall, Laura and I had decided we needed to go somewhere else. We settled on New York because A) it has seemed great on our previous visits, B) there are many publications there, so even if competition for jobs is much more fierce, at least opportunities sort of exist, which they don’t really in Utah, and C) Jay-Z/Alicia Keys said that big lights would inspire us.
Anyway, after deciding that we’d go to New York I began contacting everyone I knew who lived there. Many people gave me tips and advice, and several good friends spent a lot of time writing emails about how to make a good transition. I also contacted dozens of publications about doing internships, and eventually lined some up.
By mid November, Laura and I had a lot of info on New York. Our plan was that I would move out there in January, and Laura would follow when the school year ended. This plan was actually pretty developed. I had an internship lined up at a daily newspaper called amNewYork, as well as a couple of possible additional internships at Brooklyn papers if I wanted them. I even had a place to stay through January until I found somewhere to live.
Obviously this plan had some disadvantages, the biggest being that Laura and I would only see each other through video chat for about four months. However, it was also going to cost a lot, because I would be basically working for free while living in one of the most expensive cities in the country.
Still, we were going to make it work and I took a temporary job sometime in the fall to save up additional money. (We also went into the austere money-saving mode we were in before our summer trip.)
Then, about a week before Thanksgiving, the Daily Herald contacted me saying that a job was opening up and that I should apply. Before that day had ended, I had been offered the job. It was as a full time reporter in Provo, and was really what I think of as a “grown up” job (i.e. salary, benefits, two weeks vacation, etc.) I’d never actually had a job that wasn’t hourly, so this was serious.
Laura and I discussed the job. We were really excited to move to New York, but a job offer seemed to render more internships unnecessary. Also, my internships weren’t necessarily going to get me jobs, and if they did, those jobs might be anywhere in the country. Plus, my sense is that there are probably at least 100,000 (maybe more) unemployed writers/journalists/whatever in Brooklyn where I was going to be living. I think that eventually I could have beaten those odds, but it would have taken a long time and have been very expensive.
Ultimately, I decided to take the Herald job because, after all, that is what I was working toward all along. I figured that getting a paying job at a paper I like in a place I enjoy is pretty awesome. And while covering news (my beat is courts and cops) isn’t necessarily my long-term goal (I’m shooting for something more in features), it’s pretty cool. I’m also perpetually amazed that I’ve somehow landed a fulltime reporter position without a degree in journalism while the industry is dramatically contracting. I hesitate to say something cliché like “this is a dream come true,” but it’s close. I’m very fortunate (and covering the crime beat is making me more and more aware of just how fortunate I am).
So that’s an update and, for my NYC friends, an explanation. And while we may not come out next month, Laura and I will continue to be looking for ways to get to NYC in the future.
Ever since I graduated in August my approach to finding jobs has been a bit atypical; I figured I didn’t want to do a dead-end job, so I just started emailing places I liked asking if I could come work for them. Though this process has yet to land me a job (or even a volunteer experience, as I also told companies I’d work for free), it did get me one interview.
The interview I landed was with KUER in Salt Lake City for the position of intern-reporter. However, having essentially no journalism experience I didn’t get this position. Still, the interview was a good experience; I got to meet Jennifer Napier-Pearce (she interviewed me) and see the studio where Radio West is made (both of which experiences are things I would have driven to Salt Lake to do even if I wasn’t trying to get a job).
This interview was definitely a learning experience for me, but one part of the exchange in particular stands out. Ms. Pearce asked me what sorts of stories I’d be most interested in covering. I wanted to say, “ANYTHING BECAUSE BEING A REPORTER WOULD BE AWESOME AND I’M DESPERATE TO GET A JOB IN JOURNALISM” (in caps because I would have been yelling it). I actually said, “I’d be interested in covering a variety of topics, though right now I’m probably best equipped to cover arts and culture….”
In retrospect my answer was definitely not what KUER needed, which fact was demonstrated by Ms. Pearce’s answer: “…we cover more hard news than soft news” (that’s not word for word, but you get the gist). I probably visibly spaced out at that moment because I immediately began mentally analyzing the distinction between these two genres of journalism. What exactly makes something “hard” or “soft” for example? Who determines that? Just how aware are journalists of the (subjective) hierarchies they create when lumping some event into these categories?
Since then I’ve thought a lot about this hard news/soft news distinction. On the surface, this is a fairly obvious dichotomy. For example crime rates, politics, or scientific discoveries are easily classifiable as hard news. On the other hand, Paris Hilton’s latest hijinks are clearly less important. Said another way, some stories impact public wellbeing (hard news) and others merely boost ratings, provide entertainment, or move newspapers (soft news).
Still, that distinction places a lot of responsibility on the journalist and the categories do blur. Murders and petty crimes might have a correlation, for example, blurring the line between important and less-important stories. Or, a newspaper might discover that reporting on murders results in higher sales, so the editor chooses to disproportionately report on violence, blurring the line between public well being and sensation. In any case, hard news and soft news aren’t black and white categories and a journalist wouldn’t get anything done if she or he didn’t make some decisions about what to report.
Which is all fair enough; journalists obviously have to choose between legitimacy and sensationalism. Yet on a deeper level these decisions perhaps need reevaluation. For example, though most people would probably agree that stories about Paris Hilton are less important than stories about Barack Obama, that doesn’t nessecarily have to be the case. We as a society could decide that the most important value we share is our love of pop culture (and indeed the advent of infotainment suggests that we might). However, what if pop culture actually was more important. Imagine, for example, that someone started a religion that worshipped celebrities. Imagine we all belonged to that religion and truly believed in it. Suddenly the actions of people like Paris Hilton would mean something very different. If that’s too far-fetched (it shouldn’t be, really) imagine if Jesus Christ came back to earth as per the beliefs of most Christian denominations. He’d certainly be a celebrity worthy of biographical and human interest stories, but he’d also probably be fair game as hard news (especially if he did all that stuff the Bible says he’ll do).
My point is that the classification of certain stories as “soft news” or infotainment actually devalues things that might have immense cultural significance. While the Paris Hilton and Jesus Christ examples are extreme ones that I’m using rhetorically here, the issue does raise questions about the arts, music, cinema and all those things that don’t create new laws or inventions, but nevertheless inflect the way people behave (more than most hard news topics too). Where do these things rank compared to something like a state legislature, which is surely hard news but much less present in people’s lives than someone like Angelina Jolie? In other words, are arts and culture important? Are they hard news? Why?
In the end I largely agree with the distinctions between hard news and soft news (though I can’t help but wonder why I was told that KUER reports on hard news right after I had said I wanted to report on the arts). Still, simply because something seems to work doesn’t mean we should take it for granted. Hard news may be hard for a reason, but I still think it’s worth asking why it is.
