When I started an internship at a newspaper while I was in my last year of high school, I told myself that I would never work as a reporter.
I had higher hopes at 18 and figured that I’d be in a constant position of compromising myself artistically for the whims of one editor or the next as a reporter.
It was a major learning experience more than anything—a slow but gradual process of maturation. I was working as a freelance writer for the Community page of the newspaper by the upcoming year. Even as I started undergraduate university, I assumed that this writing track would remain as a side gig for the rest of my days! But by the time I graduated it had moved itself into a dominant place in my destiny. Within months I was accepting a work position as a full time staff writer at the same newspaper where I finished my high school internship. It was a rather odd and tough journey, but I met incredible people along the way. I was typically fascinated by the TV broadcast crew and their massive collection of stage, sound, and video equipment. They were literally stationed in the far back corner of the newsroom where the sound stayed relatively isolated. They had their own TV news network with several anchors and a weatherman. The equipment fascinated me more than anything though. There were sizable lights they had to transport around and set up in varying angles, & a massive array of cables to supply live audio to the crew members and anchors. Finally, they had a separate video production team that worked on editing the footage for broadcast. It was an impressive setup for a small city newspaper, to say the least.