The Press is Not the Enemy

The ancient cat woke me up this morning at 4:00, howling to be let out. Cold and lazy, I nudged Tim to handle it, rolled over, grabbed my phone, scrolled Facebook. I stopped at the NPR headline, “A Gentle, Agonized Response to Trump’s Rage About Journalists.”

I’ve been awake ever since.

Though my career path led me to software sales and eventually customer success, my print journalism background is the foundation of who I am as a professional. The hours spent in the college newsroom of then Southwest Texas State editing copy and writing marked some of the best times of my college experience. My pal and peer editor Carlos  and I would stay up until the wee hours, debating which phrase to use in a piece or laughing hysterically over “stupid human” stories that came over from the University Police feed. I wrote opinion columns on everything from the first “Survivor” episode to the giant rat who moved into my Travis Heights garage apartment.

As an intern for the Dripping Springs News Dispatch, I took an early morning call from the editor to chase down an emu who’d escaped from an exotic animal farm. This was pre mobile device, so I got in the car before dawn, frantically driving around in search of a missing emu. Some of the details – like who found him and how – completely escape me, but once he was back in his proper place, I used my mini cassette recorder to pretend to interview him, and laughed hysterically all by myself as I snapped photos with an actual camera with actual film, wondering what in the hell I was doing in the middle of nowhere, working up a story about a wayward emu.

I took Media Law and Ethics. At the start of the semester, I dreaded the class, assuming it would be dry and painful, but soon enough, I was the student who sat close to the front, raised my hand, and asked too many questions. The professor, Dr. Fred Blevens, a charismatic, passionate teacher, took note of my many questions, and challenged me to keep asking. He helped connect me with the right sponsor to land other internships. His passion was contagious, his teaching masterful. He made me a more curious journalist, a better listener, unafraid to engage in debate.

After graduation, I moved to Los Angeles to spend time with my sister. The plan was to stay for a while, but I wasn’t entirely sure how that would pan out. I needed money, and went to a temp agency, where I told the recruiter that I wanted to work for a newspaper or magazine. Of all of the temp agencies in LA, I happened into the agency who had a contract with Conde Nast. Later that afternoon, our landline rang, and the woman on the phone asked if I could work that afternoon at Vogue. I’m sure I fainted, slapped myself back into reality, threw on my best Target outfit, and spent a whirlwind afternoon doing menial office work while watching gorgeous, designer-clad interns rolling racks of couture through the office.

From there, I landed temp assignments at several of the Conde Nast publications -Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Lucky (RIP), and finally, a longer term assignment at Bon Appétit. As a temp, one of the strict rules was that you were not allowed to promote yourself for a job. During the 2-week assignment at the reception desk, the human resources manager and I started to engage beyond the standard “good morning” and “have a good evening.” I used that opportunity to drop every hint in the book that I wanted a longer-term job, and somehow, magic happened, and Bon Appétit hired me.

I had the lowest position at the magazine a person can have: Reader Services. To give you an idea of how proud I am of that job, I still have the yellow Conde Nast employee handbook, only recently finally parting ways with the hole-punched content inside it. When I saw my name in the masthead, I sobbed. I ran into grocery stores and opened the magazine and did a solo dance in the check-out aisle.

The job paid peanuts and was hardly glamorous, but I made lifelong friends and memories there. I never wrote a single piece of content, as that would have been years in the making. Life happened and I moved back to Texas to marry the kind of man who wakes up at 4am to help your ancient cat find the food bowl. I have absolutely no regrets.

In Austin, finding editorial work was nearly impossible. In a city saturated with talent, people don’t leave their editorial gigs. Competition is rightfully stiff. I landed a short-term assignment for Texas Monthly Custom Publishing, copyediting a travel guide for Georgia, calling hotels and motels to verify phone numbers and addresses. Over a summer, I had countless conversations with Indian men with the last name of Patel who managed motels. I loved every minute of it. That summer, a young anorexic woman who shared the cubicle with me informed me that a good way to lose weight was to eat cotton balls. I didn’t love that.

From there, my career path took a different turn, and I got married and started raising stepchildren and a baby. Years later, after battling postpartum depression, I started my blog as an outlet to talk about the ups and downs of being a wife, stepmother, and biological parent. I wrote a piece about the push and pull of being a working mother, and on a whim, pitched it to KJ Dell’Antonia, the parenting editor at The New York Times. When, months later, KJ emailed back with this simple response, I read it out loud at least 100 times.

“I’d love to take a look, thanks!”

When my piece, “‘Sleepovers’ With My 9-Year-Old Daughter” ran in the online version of The New York Times in October of 2012, Tim, Emily Rose, and my sister Emily and I sat at the Cherrywood coffee shop where I wrote the piece during my Saturday morning writing sessions, refreshing the screen over and over until it posted, and toasting  mimosas while I cried. I have the framed $100 check on the wall in my office. It’s the single best paycheck I’ve ever received, priceless next to the absurdly large corporate commission checks I’ve earned in software that have helped sustain my family for years and for which I am eternally grateful. That $100 check is priceless because it was earned over years and years of work, and the root of that work was in journalism.

If you’ve kept reading this far and you know me at all, you know that I try to keep it classy when it comes to our current administration. I try to listen to friends who have opposite opinions and try to learn from them rather than fight them. I express my feelings about the current president in the privacy of my home, where I say mean things about the president because so often, he does things deserving of baffling, red-faced anger. I admit to avoid watching the news as much as I used to because it infuriates me on a level that is difficult to explain.

So please bear with me as I say this:

THE PRESS IS NOT THE FUCKING ENEMY!

I’m sorry to my parents, my childhood youth minister, and countless sweet Methodists that I grew up with for using the big f word in writing, but I have been holding in this rage for several years now, and if I don’t release it, my head may pop off. I honestly try not to curse in my posts, but I am so effing angry it’s almost humorous.

Except it’s not.

This is scary, scary stuff here. We have a sitting president who is challenging the foundation of our very flawed and divided and already great country. We NEED the press to hold our elected officials accountable. We NEED curious and hardworking and underpaid journalists to grab their recording devices and little scribbly notepads and ask difficult questions to the president and his press secretary. We NEED journalists to report on facts, and we need writers to write opinions on all sides of the political spectrum. And if a journalist makes the decision to write actual fake news, we NEED conscientious editors to fire that journalist. When the “leader” of our country spews such ridiculous nonsense and his red-faced, angry followers start believing it, we’re chipping away at our First Amendment, and if you aren’t incensed by that, please stop for a minute and ask yourself why. When a disturbed man uses his Second Amendment right to legally buy a gun and uses that gun to murder five journalists in a newsroom, at what point to we look at our president and ask how much do his thoughtless, dangerous tweets help influence such a crime?

Believe me, I could go on, but I need to gather my thoughts and think about how I can better support my fellow journalists while balancing raising a teenager and a full-time software job. But make no mistake, I’m really angry here, so angry that this morning while Tim tried to go back to sleep, I rage cried about Donald Trump to the point where I decided to just get up already and write about it.

We will not be silenced.

______

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” – Constitution of United States of America