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.