Journalism in the 21st Century

When I worked at a trucking magazine, Trump was President. I never had an opportunity to report on him, but shortly before I started, his apearance in one of the trucks we provided on the White House lawn became iconic. Not everyone I worked with supported him, but I remained neutral, happy to have a job. Besides, what harm could he really cause? Look at him playfully mock honking, as excited as an eight year-old skipping school. Flash forward to 2024. The world is aflame with wars and hunger and deforestation. Here in Connecticut, I worry about actual flames as wildfires blaze east of Hartford. This is no time for silence. When a famous science journalist I know spoke out against Trump and his followers, she was canned. Her carefully worded apology to readers made me want to scream, "Nooo! You were speaking the truth!" For Trump 2.0 is not a cute photo op, whether he poses in a garbage truck or the fry station at McDonald's. Since we first saw him take office in J...

For the past two weeks I've stewed over the discomfiting feeling that my CV is not ATS-worthy. If you don't know this acronym, then bless your little heart. I didn't either until about five months ago, but now that I do know, I hate every last initial. Applicant tracking systems are designed to chuck out job applicants so HR managers don't actually have to read 257 resumes. The problem is, apparently the code or whatever it is you call it is not sophisticated enough to read a CV as it really exists. I, for example, was deemed an engineer by an ATS. Why? Because the word pops up a few times under names of publications I have written for, e.g. Engineering & Technology. Further, my alma mater is listed as my last employer. Really. None of this is amusing to me. A very skilled career counselor had approved my CV prior to this ATS debacle, and as I write this I still don't know how to fix it. I did some research and think if I re-save it as a plain text document I ...

One of my favorite journalists was Hunter S. Thompson. I remember my ex-boyfriend Benoît telling me that he'd loaned my copy of "Fear and Loathing" to his brother, and that they both said my comments in the margins seemed more like something a guy would have written. I took that as a compliment. In college, I took a five-unit Hemingway course (three units was the average) and loved reading his old journalistic writings. I liked being a "chick" in a man's game. It reminded me of my high school newspaper, where I was one of the only females on the team of reporters. I am still in touch with these guys, and cherish those memories from Livermore, California. So looking back, I realize I was molded long ago to be a tomboy type of journalist, one who could spar with fellows on the one hand, while still looking lovely in lace that evening. I wore the same long man's blue and white striped work shirt with jeans in college, every day, cigarette dangling from my...

Whether you are 25 or 55, as I am, transitioning from pajamas to pin-stripe suits can be a daunting experience. Once day you're eating PB&Js and working from 10 to 4 or 11 to 10 and the next you're expected to be in a cubicle by 9 and play nice with strangers. Having recently taken a staff reporting position - after 10 years of freelancing - I can attest that there are growing pains. I take responsibility for my independent skin, one that got tougher as I aged, and so learning to be in a team is sometimes tricky. Mom put it this way: "You're like Luzie (her elder cat); you don't like people to get too close." Now, Luzie and I happen to have a lovely, warm relationship. She'd wait in the doorway of "her" room alongside Mom during the four months I spent at Mom's in South Texas. She'd "meeew!" and I'd "meew!" and know just how to pet her before she bit me. So yeah, perhaps that's me, at least on days when I...

The subject of today's blog post wasn't hard to come up with: I recently made the decision to relocate for a job opportunity. However, even nearly two weeks into the job I'm still grappling with how to explain my decision-making process. It's sort of like someone throws you in a forest and tells you to find your way back to camp. You know you were at camp; you know you're only 3 miles away; but you also know you don't recognize anything where you are. Moving is one of the most stressful experiences in life, and so is taking a new job. Combined, you might as well get a divorce or grieve the loss of your puppy. I haven't researched this, but I imagine it's even harder as one ages. When I was 39 I drove across the country for a job in New York. It had been my lifelong dream to work in the Big Apple, having grown up on Woody Allen movies and fancied myself a kind of Mariel Hemingway-esque character. I would grow sophisticated on the Upper East Side and le...

Journalists are tasked with holding persons in positions of power accountable. We are also supposed to remain objective at all times, at least when we're on the job. This is probably easier for print journalists who can scowl or laugh with colleagues behind closed doors as they hammer out their latest treatise for print or online consumption. Broadcast journalists have a steeper hill to climb, though, and that has never been more apparent than during the Trump era. While CNN's Wolf Blitzer does a sterling job keeping a poker face, Anderson Cooper recently and famously rolled his eyes when speaking to Kellyanne Conway and Jake Tapper frequently smirks during interviews. CNN has a history of hiring reporters whose emotions are easy to read. Remember the Piers Morgan era and his passion for gun control? What about Don Lemon getting so drunk on New Year's Eve that it was embarrassing to watch? While these issues, one can argue, are morally poles apart from a journalistic pers...

Recently, I've experienced at least a handful of faux pas on the behalf of what I assume were millennial mistakes - calling me Laura or Miss Wiegle, not understanding what a "commission" means (do you have a dictionary?), and completely leaving out the name of an entity written in my post. In all three instances, I'm sure the offenders were in their 20's, an age when both the mind and body are more agile. I remember being 23 and stewing over whether or not I'd put my quotation marks on the right side of the period. In 2017, though, I rarely get the sense that millennials care as much about typos and grammatical errors as I did. On the flip side, they care very much about apps, social media, and the latest smartphone flavor. I recently conducted a job interview on Skype, for which I was thankful, but in the coming weeks I completely blew it when I didn't know how to fix my microphone. I ended up looking like a ludite (which I am not) in front of the thirty...

Well, well, well. You're probably reading this on your smartphone, or the mini iPad or some other tablet. If you are sitting at a desk reading this on a computer larger than a loaf of bread you are probably also listening to "Afternoon Delight" and playing Pong while you're at it. For in 2014, the year when everything journalistic was consumed not only digitally and quickly but minimally, everyone competed to do things faster and smaller than the next guy. If you were capable of reading font on a one-inch screen, hey, you've got a leg up on me. I'm still enlarging fonts and begging PRs to only send me releases with 12-point lettering. Yet, the trends toward faster and tinier were innocuous compared to the tragic assault on our industry that came with layoffs. Fewer and fewer of us were making a living as journalists -- from reductions at The New York Times to CNN to smaller papers such as the Orange County Register . At CNN, too, it seemed that the tre...

I'll admit: I have some personal baggage (is there any other kind) that makes me react severely whenever a man lies to me. This is both good and bad - good because I run away from jerks but bad because I tend to suspect, perhaps more than I should, that a fair portion of the men out there are less than angelic. It would be unprofessional to launch into too much personal history, so I'll skip right to the professional aspect of my life, the part that enjoys male colleagues as much or more than my fellow females. I've always prided myself on being "one of the guys" one minute, a lady the next. This is one reason I think I did relatively well covering Wall Street. I knew when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em, so to speak, never carrying a wink too far but then again, knowing when a skirt is better than slacks. Decent men in the businessworld understand this game, and never take it too far. They have wives, girlfriends, sisters, mothers and they are learning,...

I recently made the mistake of taking someone at their word. This was a PR, so yes, I realize that was my first mistake. However, when I went back to read their previous e-mail supposedly promising me answers to some questions the next day, I saw that the publicist had said "should". Should as in "we should have them to you by tomorrow". I then realized that top level publicists must be well-versed in the art of dishones-uh, I mean-putting-someone-offishness. Sorry, is there a proper word for this? Or should I hold off looking that up until tomorrow? This subtle difference is, of course, clear when I tutor ESL and have to explain to my student that when one says "should" it is not definite, but more definite than "may" and certainly more than "could". So why is it that I took a "should get it to you tomorrow" as definite? Was it because I was desperate to meet my deadline (which, by the way, has passed) or was I pr...

Having just tweeted a story about a promising new AIDS drug cocktail for babies, I was left wondering if I was editorializing. Not by posting the story--though it could be argued that what a journalist chooses to post reflects her judgment and is hence, subjective--but by how I chose to hashtag it. This needs no explanation for anyone even remotely in or aware of the twittersphere; hashtag, notanewsflash. So what are the rules about tweeting and journalism? If this has been written about somewhere, I am sure I haven't yet seen it. Sure, there are variations on this theme, such as how to add followers or find the right followers, how to create cool hastags and how to teach your dog to tweet. But what about the hashtag itself? I ask you, if I post one of my own articles such as I did today, regarding a decision in a New Orleans courthouse that upholds an earlier decision concerning payouts to businesses affected by the BP oil spill, if I hastag it #spillnews, am I editorializin...

New writers are thrilled just to see their name in print. I remember when I was just starting out, interning at San Francisco Magazine. It was the eighties and I was all of 23, full of enthusiasm and stupid good will. The idea of getting paid for what I loved almost sounded illegal. "Any time you write, you should be paid for your work," a slightly older and paid colleague told me. I had just written a little ad for the magazine's personals section:      San Francisco classifieds bring single bunnies up to date      Getting personal      Now! The graphics department added a bunny. After that, marketing brought me into a meeting to bolster copy for a Shell ad. I willingly obliged. I wasn't paid and didn't even think of being paid. Again, I was chastised by my older colleague. I was beginning to feel like a chump, but that feeling was soon overpowered by the thrill I got interviewing a local comedian for our special birth...

Growing is painful, or so we're told. It's never a joy at the time, but in hindsight those jarring, embarrassing, soul search-inducing moments we have with our difficult bosses and editors can push us toward a higher level. I was thinking today about some of the lessons my tough bosses taught. Without naming names or publications, here they are - in no special order: Don't reveal your reporting methods in the story, other than to say "by e-mail" or "by phone" if appropriate. For example, don't say "Joe said Ginger was a difficult boss after he looked at my picture of Ginger on the desk." It's important to keep everything in the right context, but don't pull up the curtain for your reader. If you're quoting excessively, you probably don't know what you're talking about. Do enough reporting and research to thoroughly understand your subject. Use The Economist as a model for how to do it right. Just write "he sa...