Delish Spices It Up: Infusing Lifestyle within a Journalism Career
For the past six months, I’ve been at a crossroads with what my next step as a journalist should be. I’ve spent nearly four years studying broadcast journalism at the University of Oregon because I love storytelling.
I love feature stories or profiles about unique individuals. I love capturing every aspect of the story and connecting people to other’s inspiring stories through visual storytelling.
Essentially, I love light-hearted feel-good visual content. But, I also don’t like politics, and I don’t like crime, two things that many young reporters often have to focus on when they are right-out-of-college.
And that’s why my crossroad exists. I love the lighter side of journalism and I don’t love the hard news. I want to spend time doing something I love, but in order to get there, do I have to go down the traditional “courts and cops” route?
Visiting Delish, a food media powerhouse that creates easy-to-follow recipe videos, didn’t reveal a new and clear path for me, but it did offer an alternate route to a potentially happy and enjoyable career, one that opened my eyes to all the other tangent paths that fuse a happy lifestyle with a job in journalism.
Sidenote: Enjoying my career and achieving my potential takes priority over making a plethora of money. (Not to seem like I’m giving Abraham Maslow too much credit, but the guy hit the target spot on when he created his hierarchy of needs and put self-fulfillment up top.)
A dash of Delish
Fifteen other journalism students from the University of Oregon and I got to visit Delish during our trip to NYC, where we spent five days visiting 16 media companies.
When the class first arrived at the Hearst Tower and took the elevator 18 flights up to meet Lindsay Funston, a School of Journalism and Communication alum and deputy editor at Delish, we had already been to 10 media companies and soaked up tons of great information.
Not to say we were overwhelmed. We loved all the information and insight each company and its journalists shared, but a break from the traditional hard news media world did sound nice.
And Funston’s quirky and upbeat spirit was immediately refreshing. The atmosphere at Delish wasn’t intense like a traditional newsroom. It was colorful, friendly and just the right amount of messy. The kind of mess that says, “I’m organized, but not Type A.” Might I add there were food-shaped beanbags?
My ah-ha moment
During a tour around the office, one of the assistance yelled over to us, “any of you want to try one of these weird Kit-Kat flavors? I just got back from a trip to Japan and brought back wasabi and red bean flavored Kit-Kats.” FYI: I love any food that sounds weird, yet is somehow delicious, so the idea of a wasabi flavored Kit-Kat already had me more curious than George.
So there we were, less than three minutes into the tour, and I had already opened my mind to the possibilities of infusing my hobbies (e.g. food) with my career. This was something I hadn’t considered until my experience at Delish.
The inspiration didn’t stop at the office tour. We then sat with Philip Swift, the senior video producer; Julia Smith, the social media manager; Lindsey Ramsey, the managing editor, and heard more from Funston, about life at Delish.
Each speaker gave us sound advice on how to put ourselves out there to land a job in NYC, and how to say yes to everything while evaluating our happiness in our career. Hearing them explain their vision about giving the average chefs delicious but easy-to-make recipes while seeing how much they loved their job was eye-opening.
Listening to how they push for more creativity every day, like revamping old video by re-editing it to be more engaging, something that challenges them but they love, resonated with me. It was my ah-ha moment.
I realized I needed to consider jobs that challenge me in a way that is exciting and fulfilling, and most importantly enjoyable.
Cooking up inspiration
My biggest takeaway wasn’t something they said, but something they showed. Passion.
Every student in the room would be lying if they said they didn’t see passion and life in the eyes of those Delish employees. They seemed genuinely happy to be working for Delish and excited to show off their company.
They were driven toward achieving their goals but not tired from pursuing them. (Each day they strive to reach millions of views and come up with unique recipes and videos to gain attraction, and they do it with grace and a smile.) Most importantly, they were happy to be working because they loved what they did.
Traveling to New York City for the first time with 15 wonderful classmates and two fantastic professors at the University of Oregon couldn’t have been a more thrilling, eye-opening and curiosity-sparking experience.
Not only did we look at 16 different media companies, we peaked at innovative ideas for the future of journalists. Over the week we explored a wide breadth of journalism careers and found new creative outlets for all types of storytelling.
You could say Delish cooked up some inspiration (and some amazing snickerdoodle blondies that we all had heart-eyes for).
I got a taste of New York on this trip. And I’m hungry for more.
