Career Daze
Bigfork Middle School students sat °ª mostly inert °ª as I spoke to them last week about journalism and the life of a newspaperman. I started telling them about the long hours and the challenge of getting to all the stories you possibly can. I told them about the proper style of a story and the difficulties and joys of interviewing total strangers and how some aspects of the job are a constant adventure and how some aspects are like constant Chinese water torture. Then I stopped, suddenly stricken by the obvious question I had not yet asked.
°°How many of you actually read the newspaper?°±
To my continuing surprise, half the class shot their hands into the air, clearly proud of their worldliness.
Then in what I considered a perfect example of a tough follow-up question, I asked how many of them read the newspaper other than the comics.
More than half of the hands slowly dropped in front of sheepish looks.
Not that theres anything wrong with that. Readership would probably double if the Eagle was full of Jerry Sprunger cartoons and Peanuts strips. The fact that these kids picked up a paper at all had made my day but it was after that they really started to impress.
They skated through an interviewing exercise and then started asking me tough questions about the profession, the types of questions you would expect from people with a lot more school under their belts.
They asked what the best and worst parts of the job were (meeting new and interesting people, deadlines), whether you can get rich (doubt it) and why I got interested in the first place (cant do math). Then, though, someone asked me why I love what I do.
What they also asked in that same question, without actually asking it, was if I love what I do. For anyone in any profession I would imagine the answer is °°not today°± about as often as it is °°yes.°± And so I launched into a long-winded answer about the first amendment and how the press is an integral pillar in a democracy and how digging for the truth and demanding answers and not taking things at face value is a honorable and important profession. I told them that covering small events in a community mattered to people and that when a public official or private executive or anyone else doesnt get away with something because some reporter did their job well, that by working toward the whole story a difference was made.
What I should have told them was simply that journalism is about the truth; often though we may miss it, its what we strive for. And that truth is a fine thing to spend a life 6-5searching out.
When I left the room after my pep talk °ª to the visible relief of some °ª I felt more clear about my vocation than I had in a while, and I hope they did too.