Here comes the journalist...

Has anyone ever noticed how attached journalists are to their jobs? When I first started thinking about what I wanted to do with my life being a journalist seemed like an easy way to get a job doing what I love. I could write and talk to people and well wouldn’t that be just so cool?
Well after nearly three years in school studying this fine profession I have come to a conclusion. At my graduation I should not being wearing a cap and gown, I should be wearing a wedding dress and walking down the isle to the Wedding March tune, or Paco Bell’s Cannon or some other such romantic nonsense. The fact of the matter is, we do marry our jobs. Point blank.

To survive in this profession it’s impossible to think of yourself as a normal human being, you have to be crazy bionic and not really adhere to the regular standards of all the other human beings. Editors, teachers, people reading your work, people criticizing your work they all expect the same thing: perfection. You can put together the most impressive publication on the planet and if there’s a spelling error you can be damn sure someone’s going to notice it. You can have one problem in twenty pages and someone is going to think that much less of you and the paper or magazine or website you work for.

And this is my favorite part, as journalists we put so much effort into our pieces. We drive sometimes hours and hours to put together one story. We harass people none stop, making calls, checking emails, my left hand might as well be my laptop. I mean I truly believe that the Blackberry was created for us. And then there’s writing the story, editing film, tweaking audio, checking transitions and people sit down for five minutes maybe to see what we’ve done. And when we’re really lucky they call us bias or notice the one thing we missed – a flawed transition, a misplace coma, you name it.

So like any other marriage we really have to be in love. Not just with writing, not just with talking to people, not just with never sleeping until the story’s done, or the paper’s finished, or the magazine is in print. We have to love all of it. And in the end come hell or high water we have to have passion for the pieces we do. We have to at least fall in love with the stories we cover just a little bit. Sure we have to step back and ask whether or not the story is relevant, or appropriate, or timely, we have to be unbiased about the subject matter and objective. But when the time comes to look at what we have created, we have to have a connection with it. We have to see our words, or our video or hear our audio and know that it was worth the hours we weren’t with our friends and families. That it was worth the effort and the gas and the irritation of “oh my freakin God what the hell is wrong with this source who won’t email me back!?!”

So do you take this crazy career for better or for worse, for crazy sources or sane people, for crashing computers or flawless work, as long as you both shall live?

I do.