New Stories We Tell : True Tales by America's New Generation of Great Women Journalists (9780999633885) by Ralph Kaylen (EDT); Demkiewicz Joanna (EDT)

Author:Ralph, Kaylen (EDT); Demkiewicz, Joanna (EDT) [Ralph, Kaylen; Demkiewicz, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780999633885
Publisher: Smashwords
Published: 2019-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

Your story is only as good as your sources.

When I was little, a fortune teller told my mother that I would be a news anchor one day. Perhaps my path into journalism begins there.

I really loved magazines of all kinds. I was fascinated by the way stories came together, the way they could transport you to worlds so different and distant from the one you knew. I found the process of writing to be painful when it came to coursework, and I was very bad at journaling, but I did love writing letters. I became known in my family as the one who’d make you cry with her cheesy Hallmark cards.

Before going to college I thought I wanted to be an engineer. At some point during my freshman calculus class I realized I wasn’t interested in engineering anymore. But I did enjoy staying up all night writing essays. I still found writing to be difficult, but more so rewarding. I got hooked on the process. I majored in journalism. When I read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Joan Didion’s White Album for the first time, I couldn’t believe I was reading non-fiction. I remember trying to imagine how the writer gathered such vivid details.

I graduated from college in 2007. I was told by so many people at the time, even by professors and successful journalists, that I shouldn’t go into journalism, that there were no jobs. I was eager to get my foot in the door but I couldn’t afford to take an unpaid internship. So I wound up working for a few years as a researcher in a think tank.

In the beginning, I tried freelancing short newsy pieces, but it just wasn’t the type of journalism that I’d yearned to do. I was more interested in heavily reported stories that brought a deeper understanding of the world. I became more and more convinced that to establish myself as a magazine journalist, I would need to take a risk. In 2010 I applied for a fellowship at Mother Jones. I think my research experience played to my advantage. Miraculously, I got the job.

I wore many different hats at Mother Jones—four different titles throughout my time there. It wasn’t until the last two years or so that I was spending the bulk of my time reporting. In August 2014, when an eighteen-year-old African American man named Michael Brown, Jr. was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, I was working as a producer on the data and interactives team. As the protests commenced and grabbed the nation’s attention, I was thinking a lot about how to tell compelling stories with numbers and charts. One of the questions that emerged after Ferguson was: How often does this happen across the country?

As the weeks passed, I researched how local and federal governments track these incidents, which raised more questions. Where were the gaps in the way these incidents get reported? How did the legal process work? How often were

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