That’s News To Me

In 2013, I was depressed — and I couldn’t hide it. Some days, I barely felt like getting out of bed. But I’d already secured what was basically a full-ride to college — and I ate cheap food and used my savings to buy my textbooks, which helped me afford the only things not covered by my scholarship. Because of these favorable financial circumstances, my parents begged me to stay in school and keep going to my classes.

The only problem was that I hated everything I’d agreed to study.

I was an English major, but I couldn’t stand most of our assigned readings. I have no idea if this was a byproduct of the bad feelings I already had, or if it was because I genuinely despised talking about Spenser. (A few years later, after graduating, I re-read Milton. I was surprised to find that I enjoyed Paradise Lost. I also enjoyed almost all of the books I read in my feminist literature class — but everything else was a total slog.)

At times, I would give up on an assignment, just because I couldn’t get my head around it. There were so many books that were dull, overwritten, or repetitive. I came to realize that there are so many “great books” that I will never get around to reading, simply because I don’t have an interest in them.

But I really didn’t know what else to study. I didn’t want to teach, so that eliminated areas like history and languages. Besides, the only thing I’d managed to learn in my French class was how to say “parce qu’il est sexy!” This wasn’t the professor’s fault, by the way. That was simply the only phrase I’d managed to weave into my teeny-tiny French vocabulary.

Everyone could tell that I was floundering — my professors, my parents, my classmates. I was coming to class looking downright slovenly — and I think it was pretty obvious that I really didn’t want to be there. Someone — my advisor or a professor — suggested I fill out a change-of-major form and submit it to the journalism department. This was after they found out I was on the school paper staff, way back in high school.

“If you really like to write, this is a good option,” someone said.

Through the fog of depression, somehow, I heard what they were saying. I understood that this was probably my best option — and maybe my only option.

I nodded, I filled out the form, and I signed up for classes that I hoped I would want to take.

Within a couple of semesters, things started to feel easier. Life wasn’t great — but it was tolerable. My bad attitude softened. My interests expanded and deepened — I found more and more things to care about, to pull me out of bed each morning. And my grades started to get better, too.

A few bad things lingered. I think my paranoia, my hygiene, and my anxiety temporarily worsened — but that’s because my grandmother was in the midst of fighting for her life against a nasty foe: breast cancer. In 2012 and 2013, I was a nervous wreck. But as 2014 faded into 2015, life slowly improved. I started growing out my hair, I wore better (but still ugly) clothes, and I even tried to wear makeup.

I tried to become the woman I thought I’d need to be, once I graduated.

As I was changing, the world of media was also undergoing some noteworthy transformations. At the same time that I lost seventy pounds, newspapers and magazines around the country were also trimming the fat.

(Sidenote: I’m 5’10” — around 178 cm — so I was able to disguise my Freshman Fifteen Fifty stress weight in 2013. I was also able to disguise my one-meal-a-day eating habits in 2015, when people often commented on how “great” I looked. At 29, I still weigh less than I did at 18 — but I weigh more than the 21-year-old who used to glare back at me in semi-gaunt selfies. I’m grateful to have grown upward and outward.)

By 2015, the media world had become quite a bit thinner — fewer staffers, smaller budgets, shorter articles.

Even our courses emphasized this. We had to learn how to film embeddable Vines and write listicles. This was the new direction in which we were told to look to, to build our skills, to market ourselves.

One particular moment solidified things for me: when I was working on a listicle about Thanksgiving food, I knew I genuinely didn’t want to do this anymore. I didn’t want to “make content” and I didn’t want to spend energy writing listicles. I wasn’t trying to be a snob or a know-it-all, but I felt like listicles — which were fine to read, but boring to write — were another sign of the total Buzzfeedification of the media world.

For another assignment — a more traditional assignment — we had to record ourselves reading a script. My professor noted that I kept looking at my lines — not on a teleprompter, but on a computer monitor that was slightly behind the camera. My eyes kept darting upwards, trying to follow the fast-moving words. I’d never practiced doing this before — that was the point of the assignment. But she reminded me that this was noticeable, and that it didn’t look good on camera.

I didn’t care about “looking good on camera,” because I had no intention of going into broadcast journalism. I was — and still am — a woman who’s nearly six feet tall, a brunette, a curly-haired and bespectacled broad. I looked nothing like the blondes who majored in broadcasting. I wasn’t chasing their dream, because their dream was not accessible to me. The women I saw in front of the camera looked more like Nancy Gribble than Peggy Hill.

While I’m dwelling on physical attributes, I want to make it clear that I don’t think that only blondes can become news anchors, especially as we continue to see more progressiveness in the field. I’m glad that, with each passing year, I’ve seen more and more Black reporters, Asian reporters, and fuller-figured reporters on my local news station. But even as recently as ten years ago, it was frustratingly rare to see someone who didn’t fit the “traditional” stereotype of an anchor. It felt archaic, even then.

I wasn’t a hater, but I personally didn’t want to work at a TV station. The “pivot to video” movement — which I gleefully watched crash and burn, even as Vine and TikTok grew — made it seem like no one would want to read longform articles. People wanted NowThis explainers, which they’d share on Facebook — at least that’s what they were telling us. Meanwhile, I’d have my laptop open in the back of the classroom, where I’d read articles on Longform until I had to walk over to my next class.

A couple of years ago, when I worked in a non-news-related job, a young reporter came in to do a feature — a video feature — on an event we were holding. They wanted to talk to people there, and they asked me if I would speak on camera. I basically said I didn’t feel like I had the authority to talk about the event — even though it was something pretty basic — and that I would refer them to other employees who knew more about the particulars.

At the end of the day, no one wanted to go on camera — and sometimes, I think about whether or not I should’ve agreed to be interviewed, as a last-minute standin. I don’t think I come across well via the spoken word, so I probably saved my own reputation by not being interviewed. Everybody in town would see how poorly-spoken and silly I am.

But I also wanted to help a young reporter out, and I felt like I failed. Years later, after a devastating tornado leveled my hometown, a reporter from Reuters reached out to me and asked if I would record a video where I talked about my experiences in the wake of the storm.

I respectfully declined — there were other people impacted more directly, people who would’ve been more worthy of press coverage. There were also other ways I felt that I could help my hometown than by appearing in a video about the storm.

At that time, with all the TVA substations knocked out, we didn’t have very good Internet service. I could only check the Internet when I drove over to Murray or Lyon County. It would’ve been nigh on impossible to do an interview with the folks at Reuters, anyway. But I never wanted to let another reporter down, if I could find someone else to refer them to.

That day, though, there were plenty of other people worth talking to. I didn’t mind taking a backseat, and I didn’t feel like a failure for not facilitating the news. I wasn’t the reporter, I wasn’t the subject. I was perfectly happy to sit in the audience.

Even though I had dreaded the idea of finding a job in the field, I managed to write some fun stories during my internship at a small-town newspaper. I liked it, because I got to go to a corner of Kentucky that felt similar to my own. While I was there, I wrote a feature about the success of a local winery, another feature about a local artist, and a story about the folks who kept the small-town animal shelter running smoothly. I met and interviewed lots of people that summer — administrators at a parochial school, a preacher or two, coaches, and a firefighter who was also a beekeeper.

I also met lots of people in town who I never profiled in the paper, but with whom I interacted at local events. I still remember the young football player who led me — the stray dog on campus — around the field at Football Camp. He was so bright and conversational. He would’ve made a better journalist than me.

I also remember the kids who worked at the local Mexican restaurant, the friendly teenagers who worked at the McDonald’s off of Main Street — this was a town that had maybe five restaurants, so they saw a lot of me that summer. I also remember the man at the park who moved a wolf spider off a wall and told me that the secret to keeping bugs out of your house is to get rid of all the cardboard. He was right, of course.

All of these people left an impression on me, even if I didn’t leave much of an impression on them.

It was a good summer. I enjoyed listening to small-town people — people who lived in the same world I did, even if we were from different cultural or religious or political backgrounds — talk about themselves and their hobbies, their families, their businesses, their lives. I loved to listen to them, and to preserve little elements of their town in writing.

Fifteen years from now, that town will be different — bigger or smaller. It will probably be smaller, much like my own hometown. But I preserved the town in writing, as it was during the summer of 2015. I enjoyed the work I did there. I still had that urge to tell stories about real people, and I never lost it — even though most of the writing I do now is either about myself or about my family.

Ultimately, I had to decide what I wanted — did I want writing to be my career? A job? A hobby? What did I want from it — aside from an easy answer like “fame” or “money” or “recognition,” what was it that I expected my writing to do? What stories did I want to tell — and did I have a particular audience in mind? Did I want to write to inform, or just to get ideas out of my head? There had to be a reason for me to keep writing, especially if I knew I didn’t want to make it my daily vocation.

I also wondered if the media domain I felt comfortable with — local reporting, local storytelling, local writing — was replaced by a different villain: Facebook. Did Facebook kill the local newspaper? Maybe. But Facebook didn’t kill the personal essay. Facebook breathed new life into writing about the local things people cared about. And with Facebook pages and profiles, people could write daily posts about their niche interests — with a built-in audience of friends and family. If anything, Facebook was proof that people did care about local things.

I’d been mad at the pivot-to-video movement, without even thinking about the ubiquity of social media. Locally, I would see the usual fair — recipes, pictures of school events, football scores — but I’ve also seen more personal essays there than on Thought Catalog. Forget about Buzzfeed, forget about all of that. Everything about the (relative) accessibility of reporting has changed, when “non-professionals” can share personal accounts on their personal pages. For free, with no gatekeepers or editors.

My dream of having a place for the curation of local stories lives on over on Facebook, where my former classmates write about the worst restaurants in town, the best restaurants in town, the unfair rules at their kids’ schools, and the lack of economic growth in our area. The people around me are doing original reporting — biased reporting, naturally, but the news dissemination is there. We are all reporting on something, even if it’s just to let the world know that our feelings were hurt.

There are places to share stories, even if we won’t be compensated for it. That’s not exactly fair, is it? And that’s certainly not the point I want to make: that Facebook should fill that reportage void. I cringe at the idea of that in particular, because … Facebook. And Facebook will ultimately fade into obscurity — this year, next year, fifteen years from now.

A bigger takeaway, for me, is that so many things have died or “died” — local newspapers, 2000s-era blogs, longform magazine articles, Vine, Gawker, tweeting, Jezebel — only to be replaced by another format or website or social media app. Sometimes, the replacements are more inclusive; other times, the replacements feel more and more like walled gardens. Sometimes, I think the social aspect of social media is decaying, or morphing, or devolving. But the second bit — media — will always be relevant. There will always be an alternative to whichever site you were just using.

In 2023, we have Substack newsletters and notes, Medium, Wordpress blogs, and Meta platforms. In ten years’ time, there will be other things. Everything is dying — but everything is being reborn.

Maybe there’s room to be optimistic — in 2003 and in 2013, people found places to share stories. In 2023, people have found other places to share stories — and we’ll continue to find other ways to share the information worth sharing, whether we’re professional writers, aspiring writers, bloggers, or just gossipy people with secrets to share.

I still haven’t figured out where I stand. Am I an ex-journalist? A blogger? Just a gossip? At the end of the day, I’d say I’m just a writer, just a reader, just … someone who’s like everyone else in the mediasphere. We’re all part of it. We’re all consumers and producers.

As storytellers and as audience members, we just have to be active — which is admittedly difficult, and sometimes seems like more trouble than it’s worth. But we have to be willing to try to make our own adjustments, even if they’re annoying or awkward — because the media world will keep changing, whether we love it or hate it.