The Present Tense

Drizzling rain quickly melted away the white snow that lightly blanketed Juneau yesterday morning. For my first day of work, I was kidding myself to stick sunglasses in my bag. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it dawned on me soon enough that sunglasses weather is a rarity in Southeast Alaska. I had somehow forgotten.

*

During work training today, one of the people in charge was going through the group trying to recall which ones of us had journalism experience. He started with the young woman sitting next to me and said, “You’ve had some experience in journalism,” and was about to say the same thing to me, but cut himself short. “You’ve had some experience – No, you are a journalist, aren’t you?” After I quickly confirmed his assertion I thought more about it. He used the present tense as in I am a journalist. But am I? I’m not doing any sort of journalism work at the moment. For the past three years, I’ve done zero professional journalism and have mostly been a teacher. In fact, of the almost ten years I’ve been out of college, only four of them have been devoted to a type of journalism. Would it have been more honest of me to have said today, "I was a reporter"? Of the jobs I have had though, reporting, whether for print or radio, was certainly the most rewarding and what I had the most pleasure doing. So, do we title ourselves by what we enjoy or by what we actually do? I guess, the simple answer is to not title yourself at all.

The man who had posed this question to me is someone who truly loves journalism, way more than I do. As I’m not familiar with his work, I’m not accounting for skill, but from the brief two days I’ve interacted with him, I can tell that he has a real passion for informing the public through reporting, deciphering otherwise confusing information so that people are wiser, exposing people and issues for who and what they really are. This is what he wants to do all the time. His love for it is palpable and respectable.

When it comes down to it, I can report. I can, as best to my ability, understand a topic and try to discover something new about it that’s useful to the public. I can do that and I like doing it, but what I love, what I’ve always loved, is just learning more about people and getting them to tell stories about their lives. That’s what hooked me to journalism back in college when I got to intern for the Hartford Courant. Being a “journalist” allowed me to not only ask questions, it gave me an “in” to accept answers; by being a journalist, I was worthy of people’s time and thoughtful answers, answers they may not give non-journalists. I guess it comes down to power, the power of information, to be the bearer of explanations and stories and answers.

I never went to journalism school or had proper training in reporting. In so many ways, I feel like an amateur. When I’m among a group of reporters and journalists and there’s talk of news and issues and jargon is being thrown around, I often feel out of the loop as if I’m missing something. Maybe it’s confidence I’m missing (I’ve been accused of this), maybe it’s actual knowledge, maybe it’s hunger. Maybe it’s just time.