This month, I’ve felt like a top 40 radio station. The hits just keep coming. Great writers, sharing their memories on this site. What a pleasure it has been. Catch up on all the previous posts, linked just to the right of this. Today, I’m happy to bring Charity Singleton, who writes over at Wide Open Spaces. Spend a few minutes over at her site and you’ll know she has keep insight, a tender heart toward those in the world, and a heart for God.
My First Real Job: When It’s Wrong, It’s Wrong
In the first few months of my first real job, I floated around the newsroom on a cloud. I was a cub reporter, getting regular bylines on page one of my hometown’s daily newspaper. I remember telling a new friend in the advertising department, “I can’t believe I get paid to do this.”
Those early days of beat reporting meant walking down to the county sheriff’s office each morning just a few blocks from our office and scouring the nightly log for speeding tickets and drunk driving arrests. I took calls from mortuaries and typed up obituaries in the late mornings, and just before deadline, I wrote stories from the notes I had taken at the county commissioners meeting the evening before.
In the afternoons I did ride-alongs with deputies or interviewed children about their 4-H projects. I wrote follow-up stories about lectures at the local college, or went out on a boat with the local Department of Natural Resources ranger.
In addition to the sheriff’s office and the county commissioners, my other beats were a local school board and the county zoning board. But my editor knew I liked a challenge, so he threw feature stories my way, too. And if ever there was a natural disaster or some other county emergency, I often got the story because the man in charge of the local 911 center was my cousin by marriage. When the police scanner would start squealing, my editor would yell over to me, “Call Cousin Dave and find out what’s going on.”
As far as first jobs go, mine was an ideal one. For the first few months. Before a year was up, however, the schedule of a reporter started to wear me down. I didn’t even know what a social life was because I had to be available for drug busts or zoning meetings any night of the week. And after hearing the commissioners argue with each other twice a month for a year, I wanted to stand up and say, “If you would just listen to each other, you’d realize you’re saying the same thing!”
I also felt uneasy with the number of lives I was ruining. True, it wasn’t my fault that a man in our county was arrested for drunk driving. But I was the one who published that information on the back page of the paper.
And once it was delivered all over the county, whether he was convicted or not, he was going to have a hard time getting over it. Did I mention I lived in a very small town?
And really, once I started into my second year, I could have pulled out last year’s stories and just rerun them. Covering local government tends to be kind of cyclical.
Journalism had not been my first ambition. Writing was. I knew from a very early age that my life needed to have words in it to be fulfilling. When I was in high school, I somehow got it in my mind that the only way I could make a living with words was to become a reporter. But when the schedule and the repetition and the threats of being sued all added up, I understood with surprising clarity that my first reporting job was going to be my last.
It took me years after that to find my way again. Over the next nine years, I had six different careers in three different states. I struggled to know what direction to follow, and at times questioned that I would ever be a writer.
But I never thought of going back to the newsroom. That’s the biggest lesson I learned from my first job. When it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Even if I did get to ride around in a police car.
Please, share with a friend if you feel moved.
Read all past issues at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidrupert
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In