Voice Post: Heather Bryant’s unique blend of wisdom and humor

Each Heather Bryant post feels not so much like a Stanford-educated journalist preaching didactically to the masses, but more like sitting down with an old friend over brunch mimosas to gossip about her professional woes. Therein lies Heather’s appeal as a blogger—however abstruse and niche her topics, she always manages to deploy both wisdom and humor central to her personality.

The first of Heather’s posts I stumbled upon was emblematic of her openness and (dare I say) wokeness; it was aptly titled “So this one time at a journalism conference…” Immediately, I was compelled to click the link because I already felt like I was being invited into a slice of her private life and wanted to learn more.

The gist of her post is a condemnation of the journalism industry’s classism and discrimination against her husband, who works a blue-collar job as a truck driver and garbage man. Heather questions whether this implicit bias among journalists affects the objectivity of their reporting and ability to connect with subjects or sources from different worlds. As the founder and director of Project Facet, an open source software project designed to facilitate editorial collaboration between newsrooms, and as a JSK Fellow at Stanford, Heather’s credibility and expertise to speak on this matter are undeniable. Her blog, although thoroughly casual, retains an air of professionalism.

The ellipses in her post title provide a smooth transition as Heather delves into her anecdote right off the bat: “I was talking to this person whom I’d just met. They told me about their job and where they worked. They asked me about mine.” Similar to the dialogue she incorporates from the experience— “Well, what does your husband do?” “He’s a truck driver and mechanic.” “…Oh.” — the syntax of these short, matter-of-fact sentences mirrors the brevity, curtness, and even awkwardness of the interaction itself. In doing so, Heather successfully personalizes the story by inviting the reader to relive it right alongside her.

Further, her use of punctuation in relaying dialogue— “That must be…an interesting perspective to have around.”— serve to heighten the importance of vocal pauses and convey the judgment she perceived in the speaker’s voice. This inclusion is especially necessary as Heather consequently analyzes the sentiments implicit in the conference-goer’s response: “Surprise. A little confusion. And just enough distaste to notice.” This diction in her analysis demonstrates her conscientiousness and dramatizes the event by individually emphasizing the underlying implications of the other person’s rude reaction to her husband’s job.

Heather’s confrontational yet relatable voice is further characterized through her consistent use of rhetorical questions to make points about the inherently classist and intellectualist nature of the journalism industry. By posing a series of questions that she purposely neglects to fully answer, Heather turns her personal experience outward and projects the same queries onto her readers. “If that conference interaction is how a journalist responds to my husband’s job while idly chatting, how do they cover the sanitation worker that ends up in a story they are working on? […] What does this mean for our audience’s ability to trust us?” In this way, Heather maintains a friendly persona while blatantly calling out shortcomings in journalists’ responses to economic disparities. Instead of explicitly raising grievances with the industry, she posits rhetorical devices to allow audiences to arrive at a similar conclusion about the journalism world on their own. Again, she sounds like a passionate (albeit aggravated) equal to the reader, casual yet inexplicably respectable in her complaints.

Thanks to the overwhelming traction her first post garnered, the second of Heather’s posts I will be focusing on is actually a follow-up that further addresses her frustrations with the journalism industry. In “Talking about journalism’s class problem,” Heather reflects on the barrage of feedback she received on her initial post and ultimately concludes that the state of journalism is more dire than she previously anticipated. She emphasizes that newsrooms are in trouble if journalists remain ignorant of their privilege.

“I started getting comments and messages from reporters,” Heather writes, “… in newsrooms of every size and freelancers, people who had left the business, people who had family in journalism, people who were similarly married in a mix-match of occupations.” Here, she cleverly employs the technique of anaphora to emphasize the sheer quantity of responses she received through repetition. The parallelism also injects her writing with a unique rhythm that bolsters her voice by making it more readable and relatable. It’s no surprise, then, that Heather introduces the same device in closing, as part of her call to action to the journalism community: “Hire people, not resumes. Hire for decency and teamwork. Hire for humble curiosity. Hire for dogged persistence. Hire for diverse backgrounds and varied life experiences.” The forcefulness and straightforwardness of her statements portray her voice as strong-willed and unapologetically opinionated.

The line that stood out to me most in this post evidently also stood out to others because it doubles as the top highlight: “We need to be less like flashlights and more like lighthouses, and shine for everyone.” Analogizing journalists to flashlights and the services they provide to shedding light is not only apt but kind of genius. In doing so, Heather exhibits her creativity and credibility by showing how intimately she understands the journalism profession and how strong her convictions in its role are. This metaphor extends beyond this one line, as she captions the banner image of a lighthouse with mention of how inclusive their light should be.

Throughout, Heather’s personable personality is accentuated primarily by her use of first person and “we,” which speaks to how she categorizes herself alongside her readers and thereby boosts her own credibility. The engagement she garnered in the comments—and responses so rampant they warranted a follow-up post—are a further testament to her effortless, articulate popularity and status within the journalism industry.

But no matter how high-minded her topic might seem, her medium is her message: Heather is first and foremost the girl next door who, like everyone, has some qualms about her job she’d like to air.