My Life as a Journalist: Part 1 — The Nut Graph
I’ve avoided writing about my time working for newspapers for a few years now.
A features page I designed during my time at "The Battalion."
I worked on a daily newspaper for the better part of five years — first at Texas A&M’s student newspaper, The Battalion, and then later for The Bryan/College Station Eagle.
Part of my reluctance to reminisce about my brief stint as a journalist has to do with the fact that, despite currently having a job that I love, a part of me still misses the smell of a newsroom. Recent economic developments in the world of newspapers and my continued concern for the jobs of my friends who still work in journalism has lately left me thinking about my years pushing copy.
During college, my life almost exclusively revolved around the school paper.
Except for a few short-lived extracurricular trysts, I did not participate in any other club or organization during my time at school. I lived at the paper.
I would skip entire semesters’ worth of classes, going in only for tests and spending the rest of my time in the newsroom. My friends, for the most part, consisted mainly of people I worked with.
And for a while, life was good.
I had it in my mind pretty early into my college career that I wanted to work for the paper. Submitting an application in my first week at school, I was soon hired to write film reviews and features for the Aggielife section. I later learned, though, that my career at The Battalion almost ended before it began.
When turning in my application, I submitted a few stories I had written in high school. One of the stories, a mock editorial written by high school janitor who moonlit as an obsessive stalker, turned out to be a bit too creepy for the assistant editor sorting through the applications.
Thankfully, the section editor read it and saw something salvageable in the admittedly very creepy essay. I was offered a job.
For my first year, I kept my distance from the paper — only occasionally going into the office. In lieu of wearing my partici-pants in the newsroom, I submitted an alarmingly large amount of stories from my dorm room.
I probably wrote at least fifty reviews that first year, often times seeing an article of mine published in the paper every day for an entire week. While I didn’t know many people at the paper and didn’t exceptionally feel like a big part of the staff, I loved the thrill of seeing my work published.
I wrote everything that first year. I reviewed movies, music, books and comics. I even won second place in a statewide competition for a review I had written for the “Cold Mountain” soundtrack.
My career as a features writer had a little rockier of a take-off. The first few stories I submitted were sent back several times for revisions. I had not gotten hired in time to go through training and had to learn how to write a newspaper story through trial and error — with an emphasis on the error.
The more stories I wrote, though, the more curious I became about what happened to them after I pressed the “send” button on my e-mail.
And so, at the end of my freshman year when I was approached about applying to become an editor, I quickly became interested.
At this point in my life, I was still set on attending film school after graduation. I had no real interest in becoming a journalist, but I figured that a semester working as an assistant editor for the school paper would look great on my resume.
I was about to jump into the deep end of student journalism.
To be continued…
