Lessons from New Haven

If there's one thing to be said about journalism and New York and settling into your 20s, it's that every day is a test of your comfort zone. Be it venturing into a different part of town or approaching new faces, your role as a West Coast transplant in an East Coast environment consists of always toe-ing the line between the familiar and the unfamiliar, pushing boundaries all the while. This is the time and the place to learn by trial and error, after all.

This I figured out quickly in New Haven.

When I left the city to report this past weekend (already a week ago!), I knew that I would have to bring my A-game. Working on my own (save for the two other reporters who were equally busy on their own wild goose chases) meant channeling any and all of my past experiences as a student journalist and, well, as a human being, into trying to interview reluctant sources.

I thought that 22 years of life would bring with them a certain amount of intuition, but after spending three and a half days trying to get hesitant students to speak with me, I realized that intuition or not, I'm still in an industry wherein my livelihood depends upon the whims of others.

My livelihood. Depends. Upon the whims. Of others.

Whether or not I get a story doesn't come down to an algorithm or a certain number of hours put into a given project. Whether or not I'm able to deliver a final, quality product to my editor depends upon how good I am at convincing sources that what they know is worthy of public knowledge.

I have to not only get other people to talk, I have to know just how to speak myself.

And it's a dangerous balance to find, isn't it? Journalists have that reputation of backstabbing and manipulating for the sake of a juicy story, and it's one that, though an exaggeration, is definitely based on a certain amount of truth.

With an editor at your back urging you to file your latest findings, it's often hard to admit that you've turned up nothing. That you've spent days gently talking to sources and trying to cultivate a relationship so that they will trust you enough to talk - all for naught. When push comes to shove, I can see now how easy it is to just grasp at a few small leads and blow them out of proportion, sensationalize what little bit of news there is to be had.

Reporting in New Haven last weekend was a learning experience. The frustration I felt in trying to convince sources to speak to me, knocking on doors and making phone calls, visiting organizations and juggling emails, was nothing compared to the fear and uneasiness felt by an entire community following the brutal on-campus murder. In speaking with members of the neighboring areas, I became absorbed in their concerns, their wary attitudes, their adamant stance against imposing journalists.

I was hooked.

I trolled news sites and watched the news from my hotel room into the late hours of the night, trying to find some way to understand the crime, the people, the story that was unraveling nervously for the public to see.

And what I found in all my research, and through days of speaking with community members, was that autonomy and respect are the two things that every person demands. Deprive people of either and they don't want to open up.

I never used to be good at talking to people, and I still work on it constantly. I grew up ultra quiet, always fading into backgrounds and opting to observe rather than partake. That phrase, "think before you speak"? I think I just never progressed from one stage to the next.

So I can understand the comfort it must be to stay silent. Many of the people I spoke with didn't want to go into details because they were afraid they might be wrong. Others thought it best to steer clear of the story altogether. They were all still processing the horrific events in their head, and to have the media show up and try to pry open their mouths to speak was - abrasive, to say the least.

When I fell into journalism during freshman year of college, I was pushed quite rudely out of my comfort zone. One part of the trade is listening and watching. The other part, the part I needed so badly to learn, was to speak, to initiate, to project. And goodness knows that once I started, I just couldn't stop - now I can rattle on for hours, and sometimes I talk to strangers just to test myself (not heeding those childhood warnings, I suppose), to see if I can still talk to and relate to people at random.

A part of me went into New Haven a little too confident that I would be able to speak to the people that no one else could get to, because I assumed that I had honed speaking to strangers to a tee.

What I hadn't counted on was that training and intuition aside, what I didn't have was experience - crucial on all counts. While nothing previous could have fully prepared me for the tiring nature of the 24-hour reporting, a few more life experiences definitely would have shown me just where I could push and where I should back off.

This is the stuff they just can't teach you in the classroom, and the reason I can't wait to keep learning. Each time I expand my comfort zone it means I have to push that much harder to break free of it.