The press's isolation is both part of its appeal and its greatest vulnerability.
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Recently, while looking through my elementary school yearbooks, I realized that I was never particularly fond of participating in co-ed activities.
I wasn’t a member of the Honors Chorus, and my devotion to the drama club was so weak that I only got one line in our production of Oklahoma! I didn’t join the tennis club, even though I was pretty good at the game. However, my old yearbooks confirmed that I was a proud member of one club: the journalism club. Yes, I had enjoyed my membership in the fourth estate back in elementary school.
In first and second grade, I was a key member of a student group that produced a quarterly “magazine” composed entirely of student-created material. In fact, when I was in second grade, I was apparently one of only two journalism club members who were represented on both staff lists in that year’s yearbook photos.
I suspect some students signed up without realizing how hard the work of running even a hobby magazine can be. On the other hand, I enjoyed the whole process: collecting envelopes with submissions from different classes, voting up or down on each submission, and providing feedback to our mentor as she produced each issue.
What I loved most about the journalism club was the atmosphere: the opportunity to take time off from class to meet for editorial meetings in the library, and the enormous, unfettered power to make editorial judgments about the literary or artistic talents of my peers. Remarkably, I didn’t seek control over our magazine, but simply wanted a voice in what I perceived as a fairly exclusive gathering; I was such a team player that I never voted for myself to be the magazine’s editor. I was happy just to be part of the club.
Unfortunately, my career in the journalism club came to an abrupt end in third grade when my parents decided to homeschool me. But I never stopped missing the press.
In the early years of my professional writing career, I excelled as a book reviewer and film critic for several major national publications, including National Review, the Weekly Standard, the New Criterion, and the Christian Science Monitor. However, my status as a Midwesterner placed me at a considerable distance from the publications I worked for, which were typically concentrated in the major Eastern cities of New York, Boston, and Washington. My interactions with editors were remote, and I did not feel like a “colleague” with any of my freelancers.
In a nutshell, I was very keen to get back into the journalism club.
Then, over the course of one remarkable decade, I achieved my ambition. From 2013 to 2024, I worked for a local daily newspaper. I was never a staff member, but often freelanced. At the height of my tenure at the paper, in 2019, I wrote weekly columns on classical music and film. I was in near-daily contact with the editor-in-chief, who, to my delight, preferred to discuss story ideas and edits over the phone rather than via email. On the rare occasions when I accompanied one of our photographers on a shoot, I felt like a real reporter (even if I was covering small events like art exhibits or ballet performances); on the even rarer occasions when I had reason to visit the Downtown newsroom, I felt like Clark Kent walking into the Daily Planet.
Through a combination of careful study and total absorption, I mastered the jargon that seemed to come so naturally to reporters and editors.
Sourse: theamericanconservative.com
