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 aspirations 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 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 following year. Even as I started undergraduate school, I assumed that this writing track would remain as a side gig for the rest of my life. But by the time I graduated it had moved itself into a dominant place in my destiny. Within months I was accepting a position as a full time staff writer at the very same newspaper where I completed my high school internship. It was a strange and difficult journey, but I met amazing people along the way. I was always fascinated by the television 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 fairly isolated. They had their own television news network with several anchors and a weatherman. The equipment fascinated me more than anything. There were huge lights they had to move around and set up in varying angles, as well as a huge array of cables to provide live audio to the crew members and anchors. Finally, they had a separate video production team who edited the footage for broadcast. It was a unique setup for a small city newspaper, to say the least.