I did not have a typical entrance into journalism. I never dreamed of being a reporter, nor did I receive any formal schooling or training in the subject. With luck and good timing, I fell into it.
I grew up on a rural farm with no cable or internet and spent my youth entertaining myself by reading books in barns, in trees, on a tractor and even on horseback. As a teenager, I enjoyed watching “Face the Nation” on Sunday mornings before church. And, instead of blasting Britney Spears while driving myself 15 miles to school, I often listened to NPR.
While in college in the mid-to-late 2000s, the Facebook Notes feature was popular, and I often wrote opinion column-type notes about various news and political topics happening at the time. That was before Facebook turned into a place to yell at each other and people sometimes had friendly conversations in which they disagreed. Many friends and acquaintances actually told me they were excited to see what topic I was going to choose next.
“You should write for a living!” several friends told me. “Yeah, right,” I thought. “Who on earth would pay me for my opinions?’”
I always read my university’s newspaper and aced all my English, writing and literature classes, but it never crossed my mind while trying to settle on a degree that journalism or writing was an option. I changed my major from pre-pharmacy to psychology to undecided, taking a variety of classes in the hopes of figuring out my calling in life. Unfortunately, my aha moment never arrived before my academic adviser told me I was out of time to keep hunting if I wanted to graduate on time.
I decided the simplest plan was to declare a major in the areas where I had racked up the most credits, so I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art with a music minor. After graduation, I started working in the same kind of clerical and customer service jobs everyone else my age was working, degree or not.
In the meantime, I kept being a book nerd who obsessively followed local and national news coverage on television, in print and on a new medium – podcasts. Throughout the years I have subscribed to five to 10 news or interview podcasts at a time.
In 2018, I moved to Jefferson County, a place I’d only been to visit my husband’s family. I knew nothing about the area and almost no one here. A coworker recommended I sign up to receive the county’s free paper, the Leader, which helped me learn about the towns in the area and what events were going on. My husband and I had a weekly ritual of reading the paper and then chatting about the stories and opinion columns we found interesting.
After a string of dissatisfactory office jobs, each one worse than the last, my husband pointed out an ad in the paper, looking for a newsroom clerk. I applied, interviewed and soon found myself learning how to write obituaries and post the Leader’s content online.
Learning the ins and outs of the newsroom was overwhelming at first. Not only were there industry terms I wasn’t familiar with, but the staff is so intimately familiar with nearly every aspect of the county, from local government to schools to nonprofits to businesses, that it was often hard to keep up with newsroom discussions. I felt like I had shown up for the first day of school to find that the rest of the class was taking the final.
But slowly I became familiar with the cast of characters who regularly come up at the office and started understanding the shorthand the reporters used in communicating with each other.
After a couple of months of handling the obituaries, my editor asked me if I wanted to try out some actual reporting. I was pretty intimidated because most of the other reporters, but not all, had journalism degrees and years of experience. I hadn’t written anything creative for more than a decade at that point.
My first real story was about a Crystal City teenager who had created a documentary about the city and was helping with the reopening of the Crystal City Historical Society. The story required me to interview four people, and if any of them noticed how nervous and incompetent I felt, thankfully they didn’t let on.
Writing that story showed me how much I still didn’t know about the city I lived in for four years. I didn’t know anything about the history of the glass factory or its closure. I wondered about how many other things I didn’t know.
Writing that story made me think of all the other Jefferson County transplants who may need that extra bit of explanation about why a story is important and what it means in its historical context. I try to keep those people in mind when I write.
I’d like to say that after almost three years as a reporter I’m thoroughly knowledgeable about the areas I cover, but I’m still learning things with every story I write. I’d also like to say I’m no longer nervous interviewing people, but as a somewhat shy, introverted person, I’m not sure that feeling will ever completely go away.
But I do feel like I’ve found a place in the world where I kind of fit in – with other reporters who are a bunch of book nerds and truly curious about the world around them.
Being a reporter offers me the opportunity to shine a light on the things that make Jefferson County a place worth living in, from the local government officials doing the unglamorous and often thankless work to make residents’ lives easier; to daring business owners trying out new ventures; to community members who go above and beyond to improve their neighbors’ lives; to events that keep our towns lively. I hope you enjoy reading our stories as much as we enjoy writing them.
Sharing meaningful stories with readers is what community newspapers like the Leader are all about. Community newspapers play an important role in society, and I’m glad to be a part of that.