“What I want to be doing”
So you want to be a journalist, but you like things like food, shelter, and clothing?
That’s a hard one.
You’re ready to pay your dues — really! Plans for the next two or three years unfurl crisply in your head: If you work hard enough and smart enough your internship will lead to a job which will pay you more and give you enough experience that, after no more than three years, you’ll be free to leave and to do Worthy Stories.
You’ve been warned it’ll be tough, so you steel yourself before you begin applying for jobs with titles that include “intern,” “editorial assistant,” or maybe “fellow,” if you’re feeling bold, and you vow to be back before long.
It doesn’t take long to realize that the pay is barely enough to pay for groceries (apart from Ramen, which will raise your blood pressure and seriously malnourish you), certainly not for your own reporting trips, let alone a vacation. But you stick it out, convinced that your plan will just take a little longer than you thought it might — three to four years, not two to three. You hope for a promotion to (some variation of) assistant (web) producer/editor.
But time passes and you don’t quit because every year you get salary bumps that keep up with inflation — enough to pay off your student loans, slowly. You tell yourself you’re saving up, but you don’t. You want to sunbathe on foreign beaches like your friends, to go to drinks, or to take a cab home instead of the subway because it’s late, and you come to like the security the nine-to-five you never wanted affords you. Another six months won’t hurt.
Four years turns into five and six, and “what you want to be doing” begins sounding like a naive dream.
I wish I had an answer for you, a path to follow that isn’t quite so grueling — and one that doesn’t require a certain degree of privilege (financial, professional, and otherwise). Time and the Internet have changed a lot, but not a few basics about the writing profession. Consider Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both whom wrote in a style that was ahead of, or maybe out of, their own time. Or photographers who go out and shoot portfolios before anyone offers to pay them for their pictures.
A lot of journalists who’ve gone on to publish in their own voices started by working nights and evenings, after coming home from a full day of work at a job that pays the bills. They sat down and wrote, or went out and photographed. However painful it might have been to do so, they made time for “what I want to be doing.”
— Anna Hiatt (@ahiatt), Publisher
Originally published at thebigroundtable.tumblr.com.
