Digging deeper into the newsroom community through academia

I have been a journalist for 11 years. ­As a journalist, media production and consumption are central to my life. In my time as a journalist, I worked as an editor and a reporter. I thought a lot about what stories people read and what stories I should focus on. Even when I was an editor, I did not work alone. I worked with other professionals to come up with the news we would publish and broadcast.

The newsroom is an interesting community made up of like-minded people with deep personal differences. My community, which once included the newsroom of journalists I worked with, has now expanded to include academics, as I have transitioned into the life of a media scholar. I still think about media consumption and production. I still think about what stories people read, but now I think about them in a different way. What the stories say about us is as important as what the stories say.

Additionally, as a journalist, I would strive to remove myself from the stories I cover, but as an academic my interests are central to the focus on my interest. This is in large part to the fact that the time needed to complete an academic paper versus a news story is much greater. The work I produce is also designed to say something about me — to what I’m willing to devote my life. The type of media I consume has also changed. When once I read almost only news articles, I now read publications about the news. It may seem like a substantial shift, but it feels more like a deepening of who I am.

This personal narrative was written at the 2016 Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change. It exists as part of a digital publication called MOVE which aims to educate readers on the social, political, and cultural impacts of global migration. All stories published in MOVE were created at the 2016 Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change by students and faculty from around the world.