My first paid journalism job

 

My first ever paid journalism job came my junior year of college, as a metro editor for the Daily Universe.

As these were part-time student positions supervising dozens of first-semester journalism and public relations students, we had 10 total student editor positions. I was one of two metro editors, meaning I supervised the reporters who were covering off-campus news, such as Provo city council meetings, alongside an editor named Courtney.

Although Courtney and I sat very close to each other, we often resorted to communicating over whatever Google’s version of chat was at the time so that we weren’t overheard by the reporters. This is because we only had a limited amount of space on the metro page every day, and we had to balance quality control with letting everyone get their byline in the print version at some point. Let’s just say some of our reporters were better than others.

(Some of them weren’t reporters at all, but public relations majors who were forced to take the class in an attempt to help them understand how journalism works so they didn’t become terribly useless PR flaks who don’t understand that if the paper is printed at 5 p.m. you can’t give me the information at 5:15 and be surprised it didn’t make it in. This should not take a college degree to figure out, but in some cases, apparently, even a college degree doesn’t help).

Many of our reporters were enthusiastic go-getters, however. I remember once we heard a report of a fire over the scanner but didn’t catch the location, and one intrepid reporter offered to go ride out to the smoke plume on her bike. This was both her and my first lesson in an important principle of local journalism, which is that plumes of smoke are almost always miles farther away than they appear. She never did make it all the way out there.

Overall, I loved the job. Newsrooms are usually fun, exciting places full of intelligent people who are the same kind of nerdy as I am.  I had awesome coworkers, including not only the student editors but the four faculty members who supervised the newsroom and were everything I could ask for in a mentor. We had spirited debates about the State of the Union address, rehashed BYU basketball wins, joked about anything and everything, and celebrated every possible holiday, from National Pancake Day to National Cardigan Day.

We also experienced some of the downsides of any newsroom, including hate mail from readers and anger from the subjects of our stories. For my friends who aren’t a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it’s a little hard to explain the certain flavor that early hate mail often took, but that explanation should probably start with the old joke that Catholics say their pope is infallible but don’t believe it, and members of our church say their prophet is fallible but don’t believe it.

I can’t speak to the Catholic side, but what I can speak to is that members of the church, including students at BYU, tend to have widely different ideas of what it really means when church doctrine states that, on the one hand, prophets and apostles continue to lead Jesus Christ’s church today as they did in Biblical times, passing messages from God to His children specific to their day. But on the other hand, the only perfect person to walk the Earth was Jesus Christ and therefore church leaders are flawed human beings who sometimes make mistakes.

A certain small but vocal segment of the BYU population seemed to forget the latter, and instead decided that since BYU was a church-owned school, everything that happened there was based on divine inspiration.

When we reported that people were getting undeserved parking tickets because the parking department’s new automatic license plate readers had trouble distinguishing between the letter B and the number 8, people in our newsroom generally felt that choosing a faulty brand of license plate reader was a simple mistake by some random person in Parking Services that needed fixing and not an essential part of God’s plan. But to some of the True Believers, this was the Lord’s university, and therefore any criticism of it was a sacrilegious attack on the Lord’s church and His chosen leaders.

Most of the Daily Universe editors were part of an advanced reporting class taught by Professor John Hughes, a former White House correspondent, Pulitzer Prize winner and my favorite professor at BYU. Under his expert guidance we turned out all sorts of excellent investigative reporting, from a look at the budget of the student association (spoiler alert: the student leaders spent what some would call an unreasonably large amount of money on themselves) to a data analysis showing that housing prices at BYU-approved off-campus housing were rising faster than prices outside “the bubble.”

My favorite story that I worked on was one I wrote in partnership with a student named Danny, about academic cheating at BYU. We had a lot of good interviews discussing how sometimes professors at BYU were a little too trusting that BYU students were honest people, but Danny found the crown jewel of the piece, which started this way:

The paper is days overdue. It was on her to-do list, but got relegated to the back of her mind as other assignments came and went. She still hasn’t written it, and there’s no hope of turning it in on time now. Worth 15 percent of her grade, this paper could mean a letter grade difference in the course and a several decimal point change in her GPA.

But Heather isn’t worried. The 20-year-old from Kennewick, Wash. knows the professor can be absent-minded. She knows he will e-mail her later in the semester, informing her he’s missing her grade on that particular assignment. When that e-mail comes, DeFord will be ready with her completed paper and a prepared response. “That’s strange,” she’ll say. “Here it is again.”

The original article included Heather's last name, but after some thought I took it out here, to be nice, since this is a personal blog not a newspaper, it happened when she was 12 years younger it's not essential for this story. You may think it is unbelievable that a student would agree to go on the record using her full name to describe such a strategy, but one thing I learned in journalism is that you should never assume someone won’t be willing to go on the record if you tell them that you aren’t willing to quote them without their full name.

This is one criticism I have of the national media. Journalists working for major publications have gotten far too lax about letting people stay anonymous over literally anything.

Now, I’m not saying anonymous sources don’t have their place. In my 10-year journalism career I can count on one hand the number of times I quoted a source without using their full first and last name, and all but one of those times was to protect a child. In one case in Hermiston, for example, I reported on the story of a seven-year-old accidentally shooting his two-year-old brother with a gun he found unsecured in under the front seat of his mother's care when she ran into the house to grab something after buckling up the kids. The toddler survived after brain surgery. The family agreed to an interview about the deep regret they felt about not keeping firearms locked in a safe at all times in a household with young children, in the hopes that other families would learn from their mistake, but requested their names be withheld for the sake of the seven-year-old’s future, and my editor and I agreed.

On a national level, again, there are times when using anonymous whistleblowers is reasonable to gain information vital to our nation that can’t be obtained any other way. Nixon would have never resigned without Deep Throat. But these days reporters for national media will use an anonymous source to say, “Someone says the president will announce this thing one hour from now” or other similarly trivial things that aren’t worth the way such wanton use of anonymity hurts trust in the media. The political machine in DC is allowed to get away with far too much off the record, leveraging journalists against their political opponents with no accountability. This country would be better off if papers like the Washington Post and New York Times joined together to take the same hard line on anonymous sources as journalists for local newspapers across the country who frequently tell people, “if you’re not willing to own what you’re telling me I’m not willing to write it” and often get told in return, “Alright, you can use my name, then.”

Sorry but "My golf buddies might say something disapproving" is not a valid reason to stay off the record.

Back to the Daily Universe … In addition to sometimes angering students, our investigative reporting also angered certain members of the BYU administration, who felt it was our role as a BYU-sponsored publication to focus on things that reflected positively on BYU.

Tensions between our staff and the administration escalated throughout that final semester of 2010, with professors and faculty picking sides. I learned a lot that semester about navigating office politics and navigating the line between being assertive and being insubordinate (although occasionally I channeled my frustration into being passive-aggressive instead, like when a certain professor would copy all the other professors on his emails back and forth with me show everyone how well he was handling the situation, and I would hit “reply” instead of “reply all” every time so he would have to keep looping everyone back in).

There is a lot that could be said here, but parts of it don’t feel like my story to tell, so all I’ll stick to saying that the Daily Universe staff back then were good people trying their hardest to honorably navigate the complicated balance between journalism ethics and reporting on their own school and religion, despite accusations from outside the journalism department to the contrary. We went through the wringer a bit that semester, and by the end of it I had decided that while I still loved journalism and I still loved the church, once I graduated I was moving away from Utah so I could report free from the sleepless nights that sometimes came from trying to be an objective journalist in a state where your own religion is mixed up in everything.

 As my junior year came to a close, I had a new adventure to look forward to. Every year BYU sent somewhere in the ballpark of 30 communications students to New York City for summer internships, and after initially being waitlisted, I received the news several of my fellow editors had also received: I was going to New York.

My First Internship

 

I did two internships during my time at BYU, and the first was an unpaid summer internship for my hometown newspaper, The Dalles Chronicle.

I grew up reading the Chronicle, and it shaped my idea of local journalism before I headed off to college. I had also been featured in the Chronicle a few times in high school – once, I was quoted as a student representative on a committee advising the school board; another time, I appeared in a front page photo as Cinderella’s stepmother in the spring musical. So getting my byline in that particular paper was satisfying.

Everyone at the Chronicle was significantly older than me, but the two full-time general assignment reporters, both near retirement age, were gracious in taking me under their wing. The sum total of my journalism experience thus far was a single semester at a student publication, but once I proved my worth my editor trusted me to go off and report on all sorts of stories.

I filled in for the sports reporter while he went on vacation, and while there were no high school games to cover, I filled the sports page for the week with features on off-beat “sports” like dirt biking and fly fishing. I covered various local summer events, and wrote a column defending my decision to go into journalism even though people kept telling me print was dead. One of my favorite stories I did that summer was a long Sunday feature on a tattoo artist, talking about her journey to sobriety from drugs.

During my internship I confronted one of the weaknesses that many journalists of my generation face: I really hated talking on the phone. The idea of picking up the phone and cold-calling a stranger was about as daunting as walking into an interview in my underwear.

At the Daily Universe, I had almost always been able to avoid this by using the university directory to email professors to set up an interview and then interviewing them in person. But in the real world in 2009, most businesses didn’t have a website listing all their staff email addresses, Facebook was for college students, and texting was for people who could afford to pay 10 cents a text.

I don’t know if it was more a Millennial thing or a McDowell thing. My mom and my aunt once bonded over laughing hysterically at stories of the lengths their husbands went to avoid picking up a phone. Why call the number in the window of the car you are really interested in buying, when you can just drive by it every day in the hopes that the owner will be standing there?

Either way, I had to really psyche myself up every time I made a phone call. I would literally write down a script for introducing myself and study it, rehearsing the words in my head, taking a few deep breaths and then saying to myself, “Actually, maybe I’ll do this other thing and call later.” Every time I got an answering machine, I breathed a sigh of relief.

They weren’t even hard calls, unlike later in my career, when I would have to call people to ask questions like, “Did you commit this crime you’re accused of?” or “Why did you get fired?” You would think people would yell at you or hang up on you when you told them you were going to write in the paper that they were being charged with a crime, but surprisingly, those conversations were sometimes downright pleasant. A man accused of defrauding people by collecting “investments” in creation of a biofuels plant and then allegedly spending all that money on himself, for example, cheerfully told me he would be happy to invite me to the groundbreaking when it was ready to take place.

On the other hand, sometimes the most innocuous-seeming stories you didn’t think twice about will get you yelled at. I once covered a 5k event on Thanksgiving, for example, and when I arrived I asked who was in charge and interviewed the woman who was pointed out, referring to her as “Organizer so-and-so” in the story that also featured quotes from several runners and information about the charity the event was benefitting. Later a different woman called, irate, and asked how I could be so incompetent to give someone else credit for the event that she organized. No “thank you for missing out on family time to work Thanksgiving Day to give some positive coverage of our event,” just complaints.

Anyway, I took the first step in getting over my phone phobia with my internship at the Chronicle, and survived. I couldn’t afford to spend the entire summer there, because college is expensive, but I did spend eight weeks of my four-month summer break there and then spent the next couple of months working 60-hour weeks to make up for it.

I had assumed I would be heading into my first paid journalism job in the fall, after faculty at the Daily Universe told me I did a great job as a reporter there and I should apply for a paid editor position when I came back. However, they ended up deciding to hire students who were closer to graduation and hadn’t had the opportunity for that experience yet.

This resulted in the only period of unemployment in my adult life. It was in 2009, when the recession was still going strong, and there was more supply than demand when it came to student labor. Everywhere I went that fall semester, I’d hand over my job application only to see it placed on an inch-thick stack of applications already submitted. I’d like to say that I used that extra 20 hours a week wisely, but to be honest, my grades weren’t any better, I just spent more time socializing and actually had time to watch TV for once.

I applied for the Daily Universe again as the fall semester came to a close, and at first I was once again told that there were seniors who needed the experience more than I did. But over Christmas break, I caught a lucky break: One of the girls hired had changed her mind about working there, and I was asked to take her place.

I was ready.

The Story of How I Became a Journalist

 

The first news article I ever published was in a newspaper that my brother Lance and I created. The Family News only published a single edition, created solely for the purpose of mocking my father, who had sprained his ankle by stepping on a walnut. For some reason this was very funny to us, and we let our bias on the matter show by including the line, “People say Rodney will be participating in physical therapy, which is funny because he’s a therapist too.”

Other than the front page news, titled “The Walnut Catastrophe,” the edition included an article about how our youngest brother Cole was sick that week and a tongue-in-cheek advice column in which I recommended a fictious sister frustrated by her younger brothers call Poison Control to find a suitable poison for getting rid of them

(I don’t know exactly how old I was when this took place, maybe 12? Old enough I should have had a better understanding of the purpose of Poison Control, since by then I’m pretty sure my parents had called Poison Control three times, once for each of my brothers.)

At that point, I didn’t know yet that I was going to make a career out of journalism. When I was a kid with a voracious appetite for books I said I was going to be an author, and then when I got old enough to understand how many bills adults have I went through a phase where I said I wanted to be an English teacher, because that seemed safer. During my junior year of high school, I took AP English Language, and we started off each class period reading news columns by people like George Will and Gail Collins, and I decided that being a columnist sounded like the perfect marriage of two of my great loves: Writing and telling people my opinions.

I took a journalism class my senior year, and my teacher, who went by Ms. Jennings at the time, was pretty cool.

Once, I was persuaded to skip her class by some friends who had a free period that period and wanted to hang out. It seemed like a fine idea at the time, until a few hours later when I found myself at parent-teacher conferences and realized that:

1)     My locker was next to Ms. Jennings’ room and she was sure to have noticed that I was at school that day but never quite made it to her class.

2)     This seemed sure to come up when my parents arrived at her room.

3)     My parents at this point had no idea that I occasionally did not quite make it to a class I was supposed to be attending and I wasn’t quite sure exactly how mad they would be about it.

As we made the rounds to the teachers Lance and I had, I caught a lucky break when the rest of the family was caught up by someone in the hallway and I entered Ms. Jennings’ classroom alone, looking, no doubt, incredibly guilty.

She looked at me knowingly, and said lightly, “I noticed you didn’t make it to class today. I figured after all the hard work you’ve been putting in lately you had earned a mental health day. Just know you’ve used your one for the semester.”

She did not mention anything to my parents, and out of gratitude I worked harder than ever before in her class and attended all my classes faithfully for the rest of the semester.

At the end of that class I had made up my mind that journalism did seem like something that might be a good fit, and so I signed up for some journalism prerequisites when I headed off to BYU.

Those journalism prereqs were kind of boring, to be honest. Classes about the basics of AP style really fail to capture the excitement of journalism. But I didn’t have any better ideas, so I applied for the program and was accepted.

I don’t know if this is how they still do it, but back then they throw you right into the fire your first semester in the program by making you a reporter for the school newspaper, at the time known as the Daily Universe (may it rest in peace). You were assigned a beat and spent about a million hours in the newsroom for four credits.

I was assigned the science beat, which was kind of funny considering I’m pretty sure the only reason I got a 4 on my AP Biology test in high school is that even though I couldn’t remember how the processes I was supposed to be describing on the essay portion actually worked, I had read that the judges just looked for vocabulary to check off, so I filled the essay with sentences that said things like, “Mitochondria are also involved.”

My very first story published in a newspaper printed on actual newsprint was a story about nematodes, which is a fancy way of saying I talked to a professor about his research on worms in Antarctica. It was not a very exciting story, but my parents sent me flowers congratulating me anyway, and every time I saw a student reading the paper on campus my head swelled with pride at the thought that SOMEONE IS READING SOMETHING I WROTE, even though in reality they were probably turned to the sports section.

I don’t actually remember a whole lot of other stories I wrote that semester, but a few stick out. One was a series of stories for the 200^th birthday of Charles Darwin, in which I interviewed biology professors who were all very, very big fans of Darwin. Another was a story about 2009 being the Year of Astronomy thanks to the 400^th anniversary of Galileo, in which I interviewed astronomy professors who were all very big fans of Galileo. All in all, it was a good year to be a science reporter.

The other was an interview with a professor who was studying rhinoviruses, and it’s ironic that the things that were groundbreaking to me in the interview, like the concept that people could have an asymptomatic viral respiratory infection they passed on to others unknowingly, are things that more than a decade later I would be reporting on again, this time to much more controversy.