The Making of a Journalist

I was a journalist before I even knew it.

I was about 10 years old, a fifth-grader at St. Michael's Grammar School in Union City, New Jersey--an immigrant gateway that saw a new wave of dreamers roughly every two decades.

Perhaps it was my love of magazines at that age, fueled by crushes on good boy Donny Osmond and bad boy David Cassidy, and the spot-on instincts of publications such as Tiger Beat, whose glossies of cute teen idols and fawning stories about them sent the hearts of tweeny-boppers like myself racing every month.

Or perhaps it was Psychology Today, which I also inhaled every issue of before I started high school.

For these, or none of these, reasons I decided to put together a magazine of sorts for my grade at St. Michael's. I interviewed classmates about topics I can't recall, conducted a survey (who's the funniest classmate, the most studious, the kindest, etc.), and did a few drawings, then put it all together on several sheets of 8-by-ll paper, made enough copies for everyone, stapled and distributed the "magazine."

In high school, I wrote for the Bulldog Bulletin (we were the Emerson H.S. Bulldogs). When I tranferred to Miami Senior High School, I joined the staff of the Miami High Times and wrote edgy pieces my journalism teacher and newspaper advisor Judith Krenek supported and loved, but which the administration did not. Mrs. Krenek stood firm at my side in the principal's office as we listened to his insistence that I apologize to the librarian for an article I'd written about how a student had been berated in front of others in the library after he did not salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance because, as a Jehovah's Witness, he was precluded from doing so. My article was not inaccurate; the pressure on the student was a violation of his religious freedom, as well as an attempt to do what the Supreme Court had prohibited decades earlier in a similar case involving a Jehovah's Witness student.

"I'm not apologizing," I said, as Mrs. Krenek looked straight at the principle and nodded in agreement. I remember thinking, with a mix of pride and dread, that I was inviting retaliation--sometimes those in power don't care that you're right, only that you were insubordinate, or were upsetting the apple cart. I waited and waited, days and days, then weeks and weeks, for consequences. But they never came.

They often don't. Those who abuse power often try to intimidate those who pull back the curtains on them. 

By then, I had decided to be a journalist. I had a strong sense of justice. I had joined the National Organization for Women at the age of 12, and read everything I could about the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), eagerly awaiting each NOW magazine that arrived in the mailbox. And I liked to write. I thought my mission in life would be to leverage my writing ability and knack for digging for information to explore issues and expose injustices and corruption.

Fast forward a few decades.

I've honored that mission. There was the detention center in an industrial section of Elizabeth, New Jersey where more than 300 asylum seekers with no known criminal history were detained and, I learned and reported, made to live in inhumane conditions. They were hopped around in shackles, chained to furniture while they met with their attorneys, given spoiled food, woken up in the middle of the night for headcounts, banished to segregation cells and given sedatives if they complained about how their human rights were being violated. But this, immigration officials insisted on insisting, was no jail. And the asylum seekers were not inmates, they said, but detainees. My stories, which ran under the banner headline "Shackled in the Land of Hope," rocked the agency, prompting the top brass at immigration headquarters in Washington D.C. to instruct their New Jersey people not to talk to me. They would handle this pesky reporter themselves.

The reporting led to an end to the shackling within a week of the publication of the first story, and a series of more actions--including a congressional investigation, and national reforms--as coverage continued.

There was a story about mortgage companies failing to pay property taxes on time, putting homeowners across the country in jeopardy of losing their homes. And there was the story about a day laborer who was found dead in an abandoned tractor trailer in a town where police didn't really try to learn his identity, leading to his corpse being kept in a morgue for many months.

This is the kind of thing where journalism can make a difference. I hit the streets, earning the trust of day laborers who gave bits and pieces of what they knew about the anonymous man, until I found two of his closest friends, who completed the puzzle. With the help of the Salvadoran consulate in New York, I learned the man's whole name and the town from which he hailed, and tracked down his relatives in El Salvador, breaking the news to them. A prominent philanthropist who'd read the stories arranged for him to have a proper wake, attended by day laborers, and paid to have his body flown back to El Salvador. Had his story not been told, he would have ended up in a potter's field.

They're among the stories of which I'm most proud. My body of work, like that of most journalists, also includes plenty of stories about things that didn't make people drop what they were doing and call their aunt to say "Did you see that story in The Record today?" But they needed to be written, to inform and for posterity. An editor at The Los Angeles Times once told me that most of the stories they did fell under one of two categories--entertaining but not important, important but not entertaining. 

I've had the privilege of having constant adventures and pleasant surprises in my career--not knowing this week what I will be writing about next week, or, often, not knowing this morning what news will break that I will be writing about in a few hours. I've met world leaders and heroes and heroines and got to ask them just about anything, which made some smile, and some gulp, and some stop to think because I had posed a question they had not been asked (at least for public consumption).

I've been fortunate to enter worlds and private lives I had not known well or at all and come out more enlightened and either heartened or mortified. Private people have allowed me in, and placed their trust in me to be fair and accurately reflect what they say, for which I am always grateful--even when inside I am intensely disagreeing with them, or am dismayed by what they're revealing--because a person who is not a public figure is not obligated to speak to journalists. Public figures engaging in wrongdoing have tried to dodge me, or outright lied, failing to see or believe that such arrogance usually becomes part of the story. 

No matter what the story--the important one, the brief, the fluff piece--I've handled them with a strong sense of purpose and determination to report them accurately, fairly and write them well. I do this for the person on the other end who is taking the time to read it, who will believe it, may share it, and perhaps think about and act on it.  I owe them my best. To bring that person reliable and useful--or just engaging--information and context is why I chose journalism instead of a field that is more family-friendly, pays better and has many more tangible perks.

I have tried to respond to readers who have reached out--even those who didn't have something nice to say--mindful of the fact that most people never let reporters know what they think of a story, either because they have other things to do, or they think their message to us will go unseen, or because they liked it and in such situations, they'll just finish their coffee and go about their day. 

Most of the journalists I've worked with in the last 30-ish years have left the business. Most of them were deeply committed, giving all they had to each story, even if it was one destined to be buried and unseen by the majority of our readers. One of those colleagues, a gifted writer, said to me "I didn't leave journalism. Journalism left me."