A decade of recaps: Life lessons from the last ten or so years
(By no means an exhaustive list of) What worked and what didn’t inside the newsroom
I was twenty when I first stepped in the newsroom, starting as an assistant in the editorial division before eventually finding my way into the newspaper’s research department, where I learned bulk of the things I now know about writing, journalism and everything else in between.
It has been roughly twelve years since that first day, and today seems a good day as any to try and call to mind the various lessons I have managed to collect since then, especially now that I am officially moving out of journalism to pursue something else, career-wise.
And while I have never called myself a journalist — and I likely never will — I’d like to think I spent the first decade or so of my working years trying my best to learn how to be one, and that I kept trying year in and year out.
This list is born out of all that trying.
A list of things that worked, 2005–2016
Patience, perseverance and hard work. Something we like saying in the department — Ang buhay ay tiyaga lang. Literally, All of life entails perseverance. There is no shortcut; even the way to a smarter workflow entails work. I spent the first ten or so years of my working life getting my hands dirty, and learning how not to shy away from hard tasks, and calling myself out whenever I caught myself thinking about how a certain task is beneath me (no such thing). Also: Nothing good comes easy. You know how they say if it’s too good to be true, it probably is? There have been some instances where I thought I could get away with cutting corners, only to end up having to re-do and re-check the output, thus spending more time on the task.
Teamwork and synergy. Truly, what I loved best about working in research was working in a team that worked together /physically/ — we had our own wing, were surrounded by our own files, watched our own TV and worked merrily, despite the constant newspapering stress. We laughed whenever the going got tough, and help came instantly whenever needed because we were all in a single room together. This is also true for tasks that required input from persons /outside/ the department, as with some programs and products we were also involved in. Everyone brought something to the table, and, so long as the group size was just right, getting things done was almost effortless.
Constantly charging to experience. Another thing I loved about working in media was that I was constantly learning — about this country, about other people, other countries, the world. Our work in research led us to the weirdest hunts, and introduced us to the most amusing/amazing facts — snippets of history we never really paid attention to in school; an answer to a mystery long unsolved. We learned, not only from the Internet, but also from books, libraries, old newspapers, and, of course, the veteran journalists in the newsroom. We worked alongside legends, and we learned from them every day. If there was something to truly miss, perhaps it’s this.
Asking the right questions. I don’t think a day ever went by without any of us asking a question. We were in the business of asking. We asked the questions either people didn’t have the time to, or simply did not want to. I myself didn’t like asking questions; they made me feel like I knew nothing. But that was another important thing to realize, that there was so much I did not know, and there’s even much more left to know and uncover.
The importance of context. Context is everything. Everything is a piece of a giant puzzle, and things have to be considered in relation to one another.
That sweet spot that is the balance between quality, accuracy and deadlines. Most of life was just about knowing when to be satisfied with your work enough to turn it in. Many times I found myself falling in love with all the details and wanting to put them all into the output. But doing so takes time and space — incidentally, two things anybody working for a newspaper didn’t have a lot of, in particular. There’s magic in finding that ending spot where you can say, I’ve done enough. I am done. I don’t think I mastered it, not quite, but I had my moments, few and far between.
A list of things that did not
Beating myself up over errors. This happened a lot whenever I turned in something that later turned out to contain something erroneous — a typo, or worse, a factual error. I lost sleep over them; I manufactured several disaster scenarios in my head as their hypothetical outcomes. The thing was — they were wrong, yes, but so long as they are corrected, and are never repeated, they shouldn’t have been that big of a deal. Also: Beating myself up over the errors did not really correct them, anyway, so. Useless waste of energy.
Nonexistent boundaries. I worked everywhere, because news was everywhere, 24/7, it never really sleeps, and for a while, I tried to run my life parallel to the endless news cycle: I was constantly connected. Twitter was the first and last thing I looked at; I slept with my phone beside me. Three guesses on how that turned out: Yeah, well. My media consumption habits needed recalibrating.
Getting lost in the details. Sometimes looking for the answers put me deep into forests of information. Many times I was so fascinated with the small quirky bits of data that I lost sight of what I was truly after — the big picture. I mistook the forest for the trees.
In all, I don’t think this is in any way an exhaustive list. The last twelve years perhaps contained more learnings than what I could remember as of writing. In the end though, perhaps these were the ones that truly made their mark on me. After all, after more than a decade, they are what stuck to me all this while.
