Taking a Step Back
Understanding the journalist to understand the journalism.

Just as I take the time to blog about the process of becoming a journalist and all of my ideas, experiences, and criticisms, I feel like I need to take the time to write out some thoughts on the process of becoming myself.
It’s been a particularly challenging last couple of weeks, with life accelerating into hyperdrive and finding myself particularly out of touch with tending to my own basic needs like food and sleep. I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more time at school and out on the street than I have in my own apartment. This blog post is actually three days overdue, as I had no time to write it until now. I have a tendency to put all of my energy into my work in manic bursts of productivity, and I try to make everything I do as perfect and professional-grade quality as possible. Unfortunately for my ego, it’s pretty much impossible to do that with the intensity of the Newmark J-School program, so coming up short has me constantly doubting my own ability to succeed as a reporter.
Here’s an example…
We were assigned a story that we would develop from court documents, with about three weeks to research, report, and write it. I chose to go forward with a docket from an Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH) case about a sanitation worker who overdosed on the job, but had become addicted in the first place from a workplace related injury. Despite getting the runaround from city employees and press officers, I realized through the course of the reporting (and with help from Barbara and Helina at the Newmark Research Center) that this was in fact a much larger story about the system of workers’ compensation as it relates to the opioid crisis.
But is it? I failed to reach my deadline, handing in a measly 400 words that don’t tell much of anything, and I move forward on a bunch of assumptions that I’m attempting to dig into to evaluate their truth. I was afraid to make the story about a single individual whose privacy I might violate, so I feel like I convinced myself to move elsewhere because of my moral conviction that reporting shouldn’t be extractive. I’m totally unsure of how to decide what the boundaries of a story are, and I’m worried that editors aren’t going to give a shit what I believe to be the moral guidelines of that story. As a freelancer, I worry that I’ll starve.
As we narrow down the boundaries of our community focus for the Social Journalism program, I’ve been meeting with professors and mentors like Terry Parris Jr. and Jeff Jarvis to help me understand what my work could look like moving forward. But at the center of the work is a “why?” factor that must be answered. Why am I doing what I’m doing?
My focus (as of now) is going to be on the activists and health workers who are doing work to end the opioid crisis in the South Bronx. So why do I want to focus on that? For one thing, I’ve been working on the peripheral edge of where public health happens for a while now, and the opioid crisis in and of itself is an intellectual interest for me. In the time I’ve spent so far in the South Bronx, I often hear things to the tune of “Nobody cared about opioids until white kids started ODing in Staten Island, we’ve been having a crisis for 50 years!” I’m having difficulty reconciling the privilege that I bring to the community, coming from a middle class white upbringing in New Jersey, and hoping to do journalism in a Latin neighborhood that has been underserved by the city. But I fail to believe this is some kind of white savior complex that I’m embodying, I don’t have any illusions that my journalism can or should save anyone. What I see is a community who could use the assets of journalism to bolster its work and push back against some of the social forces that have resulted in an overdose crisis. I feel like as a matter of justice, because I’m aware of the problem and the feelings of some members of the community, it’s my duty to help do what I can with the skills of a reporter and community organizer to report on what’s happening, and then work with the community to create something together and make progress on the issue.
But for now, I’m quite scared. I’m afraid that I’ll be rejected because I’m an outsider. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to communicate effectively because I’m not a fluent Spanish speaker. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to offer anything valuable for anyone to even want to work with me. I’m afraid that I’ll be seen as too close to the activism, and that my work isn’t reputable because of my bias (an idea I’ve rejected in past blog posts, but is still largely ubiquitous in the media world.) I’m afraid that if I can’t weather the storms inside my own mind that I won’t be of any use to anyone, and that I’m simply not cut out for this.
Currently, I’m doing my best to try and overcome these doubts so that I can be of service to at least someone. I’m going to counseling (thank you to the wonderful people at the CUNY Graduate Center), and I’m leaning on friends and mentors for support. I’m going on long walks alone and trying to sing when I can. This is only the beginning of my career, and I can tell that it’s only going to get more difficult to take care of myself in an industry that is built upon the nonstop productivity of its worker bees. Hopefully my dreams of a slow, engaging journalism will take hold, but that’s another blog post in and of itself.
So there you have it, dear reader. In the spirit of full transparency, I believe that you should understand the journalist if you want to fully understand the journalism. I want to use my open-book personality to bring people into the process of the story, but I think that first requires me to invite you to have a look into my mind and my emotional state.
This is a long and confusing journey, but for all my worries and all of my doubts, I think I’m going to be okay. I just hope that you will be too.
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
