Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: career

The Only Way Out is Through

How the JSK Fellowship is teaching me to learn to lean on others

The last year has turned my life upside down in so many ways. The JSK fellowship gave me the time, space and perspective to find out what I want to do with my life and my career. It gave me a home and a community when I felt adrift. And more recently, the fellowship has given me a protective cocoon during what has been one of the hardest times of my life.

Nothing could have prepared me for April 1, 2019. As a journalist, I’ve always hated the carelessness of April Fool’s Day and the hoaxes it inevitably spawns. In 2014, I lost my job on this day. This year on this day, I found out I have cancer.  

It felt almost Shakespearean. The heroine is on top of the world, confident of her life and its direction, only to be felled by a major setback at what should have been her time of triumph. While it is never a good time to find out something like this, I’m lucky it came at a time when I have had so much support. All I had to do was learn to take it.

I’ve never been good at leaning on others. I hate asking for favors, but I love fulfilling them (blame my Ohio Methodist upbringing). For the past several years, I followed the advice of many a management book and “faked it until I made it” and part of that was also pretending I never needed help along the way. Admitting vulnerability and weakness was not an option, or so I thought. I’ve learned in my time at Stanford to embrace my vulnerability in the workplace, but I wasn’t prepared to have to do so in my personal life.

But then April 1st came.

At first, I tried to stay my usual self. Less than an hour after my diagnosis, I got on the phone in my doctor’s parking lot to interview for two different jobs. Then I had to call my mom and tell her the news. Looking back, I can’t decide if that chain of events was possible due to toughness, denial – or outright insanity.

My first instinct was to hide it, not only from all of my friends back East, but also the people who see me every day at Stanford. I didn’t want anyone to see my eventual deterioration. It quickly became evident that I couldn’t entirely keep my illness to myself. How do you reasonably answer a question like, “How are you?” without lying?

When I finally told the other JSK fellows, I felt a sense of relief I hadn’t expected. It didn’t feel like a defeat, it felt like a weight had been lifted. After the initial hugs and promises of support, my friends in fellowship really showed up for me in a ways I didn’t know I needed. In fact, I was a little embarrassed at first, to accept it.

They started delivering dinner to my house every day to take the load off my supportive and overworked husband. They offered to run errands and rides to where I needed to go. They’ve given me excuses to bail on things I didn’t feel like doing and taken notes in classes I had to miss due to my appointments. Within our circle, we can laugh at the absurdity of what I’m dealing with, whether that’s trying on hilarious wigs in pursuit of the one that’ll make me feel most normal or taking advantage of my newly minted designated driver status. They even all got temporary tattoos in homage to the one on my right arm reading: More. I have never been so touched.

Above all, my fellowship group has given me the confidence to keep dreaming and planning for my future, despite cancer being an unavoidable part of it. To many people in my life, my day-to-day health and status as a patient is an all-consuming aspect of our relationship. I’m encouraged not to worry about what I have to do, to just focus on getting better and let the future happen later, when this is all over.

But that’s not me. The other fellows know it and didn’t let me forget it.

I’m taking on the future I want regardless of what cancer has planned. I can learn to lean on my friends and colleagues, to ask for help when I need it and take time off (and naps) without guilt or fear of looking weak.  I will take a new job and give the best of myself despite the fact that I’m sometimes tired, nauseous and have no hair of my own anymore.

As Sheryl Sandberg said in her 2017 commencement speech at Virginia Tech, “There are times to lean in and there are times to lean on… If you are there for your friends and let them be there for you…that won’t just make you more resilient, it’ll help you lead a deeper and more meaningful life.”


As much as it dominates my life right now, I can’t afford to let 2019 be my lost cancer year. This is the year of completing my work on disinformation and trust via Project Disconnect. It’s my year of establishing new lifelong friendships through this program. It’s my year for finding myself.

Thanks to JSK, 2019 is my year for new beginnings.


The above is a re-post from the JSK 2019 Medium site. I am still finishing up my JSK research project, but if you want to be alerted when the Project Disconnect report is available, please sign up for the mailing list or watch this space. 

Alex Capaldi/DKS

On heading back to school and back to basics

I was ecstatic when I found out I was selected to join the 2018-19 fellowship class of the John S. Knight program at Stanford. It’s going to be a big change for me – of jobs and coasts – but I’m as ready as I can be.

I am pretty sure I first heard about the JSK fellowship back in 2007 and the idea of leaving a good job to go to school seemed so odd to me at that part of my career. My youthful ambition told me if I wanted to “make it”, I would never be able to take time off – nor would I want to.

But over the course of many years since then, I have met many Knight fellows and all of them, to a person, have told me how the experience changed their lives. I’ve known for years now that it was something I would want to do when the time was right. When I saw one of the themes for this year’s program was disinformation, it felt like it was meant to be.

It may seem odd to depart Storyful just a few months after being elevated to Editor in Chief, but then again, there’s never a good time to separate yourself from a job that is your whole life.

My past [nearly] four years at Storyful have been so rewarding – and a nonstop sprint. I have rarely gotten a chance to spend time digging in on the initiatives and stories that most interest me. As the newsroom has expanded its scope to include investigation into social media movements and disinformation – I haven’t had much of a chance to really get into the hands-on work the way I wish I could. Now is my chance.

In addition to my research, I plan to spend the next year or so focusing on answering some important questions for myself: What am I doing? Why does it matter? Where do I fit into the journalism industry today? What do I really want to do with the rest of my career?

You know, the easy ones.

I look forward to a year on pause. I want to read more, get outside and hike on the weekends, and just generally spend more time being present and less time juggling the emails, all-hours meetings and constant notifications that dominate my life these days.

Alex Capaldi/DKS

This is an example of how it went the last time I was in college.

I’d love to be able to revert to my college-aged self, but without the incredible angst and “working four jobs just to pay rent” part. I want to rediscover the open-mindedness I had about myself and the industry back then. Revisiting my college wardrobe would also be great (I hope cargo pants are still around!).

Best of all, as part of my agreement to join the JSK program, I agreed to publicly share my progress against my research question (more to come on that). That means this site will go back to being an active blog again, not just an occasional dumping ground for errant thoughts (though it will also be that). This should be good news for those spammers who constantly keep asking if I want a website redesign (the answer is still no).

I have a couple of weeks left at Storyful before I head out for this next chapter, but in the meantime, watch this space.

Storyful

My next adventure: Joining Storyful’s Open Newsroom

Looking for a job is, in a lot of ways, a lot like dating*. You meet a lot of people and you talk – a lot – about yourself, about them, about your expectations for a future together. You re-examine what worked and what didn’t about past relationships, and try to find a partner that embodies the best of those memories. It’s all about looking for a good fit. After a lot of looking and a few false starts, I think I’ve found it.

I started earlier this week as Open Newsroom Editor for Storyful – and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Storyful

If you aren’t familiar with Storyful, it is a 24/7 social media news agency that discovers, verifies and delivers user-created content to newsrooms, brands and storytellers of all sorts. Storyful built its initial business providing verified UGC and information to partners via subscription service. The Open Newsroom is a consumer-facing companion piece, operating as a public space for crowdsourced verification and publication through the likes of Google and Facebook. I’ll be continuing to grow that outward-facing aspect of Storyful and its relationships with platforms, partners and stories.

It’s a good fit, to be sure. Collaborative journalism and social media has been the bedrock of my journalism career. I been talking about crowdsourcing, social media/UGC ethics, verification and UGC best practices for several years – and I’ve done a lot of training for journalists in those fields. For me, joining Storyful is like being asked to join the Avengers- they know this stuff better than anyone.

Storyful has been one of the most prominent voices in the industry as it pertains to social media verification and ethics in using user-generated content (which, it just so happens, happen to be pet issues of mine as well). Its best practices and breaking news case studies have been part of my classroom curriculum for years. Now, I get to be more than an admirer – I get to be on the team.

I can’t wait to get started on this new bright future.

Casablanca Quote   Eds Note:  The past few months, since Thunderdome was shut down,  have been an especially tough stretch for me, both personally and professionally. Big thank-yous are in order for many people, but especially Robyn Tomlin, Jim Brady and Jennifer Preston – who have helped me out by listening to my whining, giving advice, making introductions and buying drinks as needed.  And I wouldn’t have come out the other side without my husband/crisis counselor, Ben, who has patiently dealt with my many phases of layoff grief.

 

* Or so I hear, I haven’t dated in a long time.

Moving into the terrifying new something

It’s been my experience that every now and then, you have to be terrified to really feel like you’re challenging yourself professionally. I haven’t felt terrified in a long time – until today.

I’m leaving the Huffington Post – my home for the last 10 months – to take on a challenge that’s so different from anything I’ve ever done, I want to start breathing into a paper bag just thinking about it.

I’ll be rejoining my old bosses from TBD – Jim Brady and Steve Buttry – at Digital First Media as a player-to-be-titled later. I’m excited to be “getting the band back together” – I felt that TBD had an excellent group of journalists that just never got the time to finish what we started. Maybe this is my chance to do complete some of those goals.

If you aren’t familiar with Digital First, it’s an exciting new company joining together Journal Register and Media News properties. The company includes papers from the likes of the Denver Post and Los Angeles Daily News to the Trentonian (in New Jersey) the (Lorain, OH) Morning Journal and tons of small dailies and weeklies all over the place.

I’m getting out of the business of running social media accounts and getting back to my local journalism roots. I’ll be working with local journalists all over DFM’s many daily and weekly papers to help them learn new digital practices and social media skills. I’ll also get the chance to be a part of local news again by working on special projects, digital strategy and breaking news at local properties and company-wide. It’s a change that’s a long time coming – and one I hope can get me back into learning as much as I’m teaching.

I also plan to still be writing here (hopefully more often) about what I’m learning, what’s going on in social/digital media and the occasional rant about Things on the Internet.

It isn’t a glamour move – I’m sure all of my Facebook subscribers will no longer find me exciting when I leave HuffPost – but I know I can’t stand still. I’m scared to death but also kind of relieved to get out of the social media editor game (more on that later). I still need to grow as a journalist – and the only way to learn to swim is jump right in. I hope you guys will be there to learn with me.

What job is best for journalism right now?

So I’ve been going through something of a journalistic identity crisis lately that’s put me in a real malaise about the industry at large and my own career. So if you’ll let me get a little personal for a post, I could use some help crafting a useful new job that could help my newsroom – and help my future a little bit too.

After seeing just about every low point of staff morale and picking up more tasks seemingly every day – I’m not really sure how to describe what I do anymore or see what could possibly come next in my career path. (I used to have a plan – but it’s pretty much moot now.)

I have my annual review coming up at work and I hope to craft a new job description for myself.  Problem is, I’m no longer sure what I’m best suited for or what skills might be most useful for my newspaper or any other media organization.

Right now, my business cards still say Social Media Editor. While I like keeping the title so it sounds like I have a really innovative and cool job, my paper really can’t afford to have a position like that of, say, Robert Quigley in Austin. (After reading about the cool stuff he gets to do all day seemingly without any day-to-day news constraints, I wonder what paper can.)

So here’s what I’d like to know from you:

What kind of non-reporting journalist would most benefit you as a news consumer? What would you like to see a local news outlet do differently (that could realistically be achieved by one person)?

If you work in journalism, what skills are missing from your organization? What kind of online position would help the newsroom at large?

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