I always wanted to be a reporter
A decade before this picture was taken, before I decided to go to Marquette University to major in journalism, I knew I wanted to be a reporter.
It was 1989. I distinctly remember sitting down after school at my desk that had been positioned just so in my bedroom with pink walls and pink carpeting. I was reading through the columns of the St. John Bosco grade school newsletter.
I wasn’t just reading it, however. No. I was proofing it. After all, I was the editor of the student newspaper.
And that’s it. Since I was an eighth grader, I wanted to be a reporter. I wanted to write words that people would read. I wanted to ask questions, get the answers and put it all together.
I had been bullied in middle school so I knew a little something about having thick skin. I also had to study hard for every good grade I received so I knew about diligence and methodology.
And I did it. I got an internship in college (insert hard knocks reporting experience of the City News Bureau in Chicago) and I worked for The Associated Press, coordinating election reporting across Wisconsin’s 72 counties. After college, I worked for the AP in Milwaukee and Lansing, Michigan, and then newspapers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
I spent 15-some years as a reporter and editor. Of course, I made mistakes along the way, but I always tried. I tried to ask the right questions of the right people and explain things in ways people would understand.
And oh my gosh! Journalism showed me so much that I wouldn’t have seen or experienced otherwise — from the inside of a Baptist church in downtown Detroit on a Sunday morning to the darkness of a Chicago street where a body had just been pulled off the pavement. I interviewed Dick Cheney alongside a campaign tour bus. I sat down in the living room of a woman who found out the day before that her son had been killed in Iraq.
Journalism is hard work and, at least to me, to do it requires a deep-seated belief that you’re helping someone somewhere — and I don’t mean the ‘get something’ kind of help. I mean helping readers understand different situations, different problems and different ways of life.
I’m writing about my experience because I think it’s particularly important to note the hard work required of journalists as the President of the United States mocks ‘The Media’ and the Washington press corps. No one, no one, should be mocked and called a fake in front of their colleagues — or anyone anywhere, for that matter.
While I’m not a journalist any more, I do feel an incredible kinship with the folks slogging it out every day. I’m cheering for you — whether you’re showing up to cover a guy who hates you or you’re going into a newsroom every day that has more empty desks than actual people.
And I hope my cheering section will grow as people learn the importance of bright lights in dark places. Many people who aren’t in that cheering section yet may end up there because they’ll be among those helped by your questions, your tenacity and your hard work. You can’t change anything — plumbing for a kitchen sink, an infection in a human body or even a government — without shining a light on it.
