Want to know a secret?
I didn’t grow up with a burning desire to be a reporter.
A lot of my colleagues did. They yearned to be the next Woodward and Bernstein, they had childhood dreams of getting the big story, of yelling “Stop the presses!” like they were in a Howard Hawks movie starring Cary Grant. They have a calling.
I grew up, meanwhile, wanting to write stories about spaceships and robots and dragons for money. To be the next William Gibson or Martha Wells or Diana Wynne Jones.
But I was also relentlessly practical, even as a teenager. Fiction writers, I found out early on, could live a precarious existence.
Reporters at newspapers got paid every two weeks like normal people, and there was very little heavy lifting.
I liked writing. Reporting was a kind of writing. It sounded like a pretty sweet deal!
It helps that I came from a family where being informed was considered a sort of moral good. We watched the evening news and political debates, we had newspaper subscriptions (Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side were on the funny pages, it was a golden age). We talked – and sometimes argued – about news over the dinner table.
So when I came to reporting as a job, I took it seriously. No, it wasn’t a calling. It wasn’t my lifelong dream. But it’s work I believed was worth doing well.
This week (Oct. 6 to 12) is National Newspapers Week. It’s a time for the news industry, particularly the print side of it, to toot its own horn.
It’s been a tough quarter century for newspapers, which more or less corresponds to my time working for them (it’s not my fault, I swear). There are fewer papers now, and a lot fewer reporters.
And yet, the papers that are here are still vitally important. I believe this more every year I do this job.
I recently won a Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Best Feature Series. I was reasonably pleased by that; I put a lot of work into those stories. But they’re far from the most impactful items I’ve ever written. Some stories that seemed small have helped people in ways I still think about, years later. The day-to-day work of covering local community news and events, of doing it accurately and with care, is far more important than “big” stories. I’m always learning how to do it better.
Being a reporter comes with the benefit of endless variety. You can cover a murder trial, a political rally, a museum fundraiser, and a giant pumpkin contest in the same week. I’ve interviewed people in rowboats, biplanes, clock towers, prisons, cranberry bogs, llama shearing barns, and allegedly haunted houses.
It’s a strange job. We’re doing work that we’re repeatedly told is vital to our communities, and we’re also told (often via social media) that we’re hacks, liars, and/or in the pay of various political figures. Trust me, if I was getting bribed, I’d have a nicer car.
I didn’t start out with a deep desire to be a reporter. But the job has grown into me, and I’ve at least partly grown into the job. It is important, when done well it’s even vital, and I’ll stand by that idea forever.
