Given the economic tumult my industry has experienced, surviving 10 years is a feat. I started interning in June 2007 and got hired at my first full-time newspaper job in March 2008, right after Bear Stearns collapsed on Wall Street. It was like hopping on board the Titanic with the iceberg already in view.
At the start of this month [June 2017], I celebrated 10 years of working in the newspaper industry. In my profession’s heyday, that wasn’t worth celebrating. Journalists routinely spent decades working for daily or weekly newspapers.
Given the economic tumult my industry has experienced, surviving 10 years is a feat. I started interning in June 2007 and got hired at my first full-time newspaper job in March 2008, right after Bear Stearns collapsed on Wall Street. It was like hopping on board the Titanic with the iceberg already in view.
My interest in journalism started in my junior year of high school, when my passion for writing motivated me to try a stint on the student newspaper. A family member asked if I knew that my grandfather, Ros, had worked in newspapers. Naively, I did not.
He had spent his entire career in newspapers. He started as a high school sports writer for the newspaper in his hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, in the late 1940s. He moved up and joined the Omaha World-Herald bureau covering the Iowa Legislature in the early 1960s.
By the 1970s, he had moved on to the Des Moines Register and worked as an editorial writer and columnist.
After reading his articles and talking to him, I didn’t need any more persuading that my future belonged to newspapers. I was hooked.
I spent my senior year editing the student paper and reading The New York Times during class, in addition to devouring dense history books about American journalism, like David Halberstam’s “The Powers That Be.”
By the time I graduated, I was sure I would have a lengthy career as a White House or congressional correspondent for the Times or The Washington Post. At worst, I would work for the Boston Globe.
Looking back, I can smile at the folly of those ego-driven fantasies.
When I was in college, a reporter told me that a successful career in newspapers meant you worked for progressively larger papers.
I’ve done the opposite. My career started with internships at a business magazine and then The Oregonian. I worked at The Bellingham Herald and then the Napa Valley Register after that. I landed at the Mountain Express two years ago.
Each newspaper has been smaller than the last, and I consider that a good thing. I appreciate the importance of community journalism and the relationship a newspaper has with its readers. We have too many journalists devoted to national politics and too few covering city councils and state legislatures.
My grandfather died in 2012, so he won’t celebrate this milestone with me. His encouragement got me started in this business—and more importantly, kept me going.
One of the last times I saw him was on Thanksgiving 2011, when I was getting ready to move to California. The Herald had laid me off in the spring and I wasn’t sure if I should stick with journalism. I could barely afford the gas to get to his house in Olympia, Wash.
But I made it, and we spent time talking about newspapers, as we usually did at the holidays. He helped remind me that this noble calling was still worth pursuing, and I haven’t doubted it since.
I woke up Christmas Day that year alone, in a strange state I’d never known. I went to work in the Register’s newsroom in Napa, listening to the police scanner. I was happy.
My grandfather once wrote a column about the significance of Christmas, recalling his childhood in Waterloo.
“Christmas was the bright day that interrupted the bleak season between harvest and seedtime, between fall’s receding and spring’s renewing, and, just maybe, between economic despair and good times,” he wrote.
I understand what he meant.
Graphic courtesy The Napa Valley Register. I helped create this graphic for a commemorative edition celebrating the 150th anniversary of the newspaper's founding in August 2013. This column was published in the Idaho Mountain Express in June 2017.
