I began my career in journalism at 15 as a summer intern at my hometown’s newspaper, the Warwick Beacon. In the wake of my clumsy, adolescent enthusiasm, my office outfits were confused; I regularly donned brightly colored dresses with frilly sleeves and dancing patterns, strapped my feet into shoes adorned with gaudy artificial flowers. But for the first time in my life I finally had an idea of who I wanted to be. The prospect of a future as a writer was now a tangible thing I could achieve, and I had no intention of allowing myself to mess any of it up.
On my second day of the internship, the desk phone rang. In between researching local events and jotting down notes, I had completely forgotten that I was supposed to conduct a phone interview with a local author whose new book was set to launch that week. I had prepared no questions for her, and now here she was on the other end of the line, waiting. I would have to wing it. After nervously identifying myself as an intern, I half-heartedly asked why she had decided to write her book.
Her laughter crackled through the desk phone. “You’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel, huh?”
Before I could fumble a response, she had reassured me that she would call later when I had more time to prepare, with a sort of kind amusement in her voice that somehow felt worse than if she had openly berated me for my unpreparedness. The call ended and I sat there with the now silent receiver in my hand, like an unwieldy paperweight.
I chalked up this incident to a complete disaster, irrevocable evidence that I was in the wrong field. But what I would one day realize was that this experience was a precocious lesson for a young journalist: that to succeed, I would have to quickly get comfortable with the feeling of complete, utter stupidity.
To be a journalist is to be awkward by trade. You are inserting yourself into the stream of another person’s life as soon as you send an inquiring email, or dial a number to cold call, or lurk at the back of a presentation room to accost the speaker for an interview the minute they step away from the podium. You sometimes get the sense that you are nothing more than a nuisance as you pester strangers for information. In order to succeed, getting used to that constant ambience of uncertainty is a must.
Writing this out, I realize that I’m making my chosen field sound much more thankless and dismal than it actually is. The truth is that reporting, from my high school days writing at the Beacon to my current position at my college newspaper, has brought me immeasurable joy. I’ve gotten to interview dozens of people from all walks of life who have spoken with me about their struggles, their innermost thoughts, and their most dedicated personal projects. But the fact remains that, while I’ve improved a lot over the last five years, I still struggle with letting myself feel stupid. Rather than accept my ignorance as an opportunity to grow, I want to excise it from my being like a vestigial organ and discard it forever. In reality, approaching a subject you know little about at first in your reporting with an open mind can lead to your most fulfilling stories. By trusting your own ability to gather the facts, you can begin a story with little information about the subject and end it completely confident in your ability to showcase what you’ve learned.
If you are an early career journalist trying to break into any aspect of the field, I urge you to grant yourself permission to be relentlessly, unapologetically stupid. Nervously fumble your introduction when you approach a potential interviewee. Completely botch your InDesign layout files and start again from scratch. Reach back out to someone two, three, four times to get information you forgot to ask about the first time. Get every silly mistake out of your system now, so you can then make room for all of the future ones you will inevitably make. Most importantly, trust that all of these exercises in awkwardness, however humiliating they initially are, will be worth every second when you reap their benefits. People are much more often kind than cruel, and the initial nervousness you feel at asking them simplistic interview questions can quickly dissolve as you find yourself immersed in what they have to say.
At a Lunch-and-Learn session with the station’s interns earlier this summer, Rhode Island PBS Weekly reporter Michelle San Miguel told us not to fear what we don’t know. As a young reporter trying to prove yourself, she said, there is a fear of looking stupid that can hold you back from asking the questions you want (and need!) to ask. It meant so much to hear that from someone established in the field, because it put to rest the idea that I was uniquely incompetent in some way because of how often I felt uncertain in my work. The entire staff of Rhode Island PBS has been incredibly supportive during my time here, and has given me the confidence I need to continue working in the journalism field. I am deeply grateful for all of the care given to developing the skills of the station’s interns this summer.
In today’s world of polished LinkedIn profiles and breathless career updates on Instagram stories, it is effortless as a college student to buy into the illusion that everyone else has it figured out. It is easy to brand yourself as the one failure amidst a set of glamorous twenty-something pre-professionals, whose carefully curated online presence differs wildly from your lived reality. I think the most radical thing you can do is give yourself room to fail and stray from that perfect image, embracing that your setbacks will one day inform your future. Journalist David Carr, in an interview with Boston University, once said the following:
“If you’re gonna get a job that’s a little bit of a caper, that isn’t really a job, that under ideal circumstances you get to at least leave the building and leave your desktop, go out, find people more interesting than you, learn about something, come back and tell other people about it — that should be hard to get into. That should be hard to do. No wonder everybody’s lined up, trying to get into it. It beats working.”
As I wrap up my second summer as an intern at Rhode Island PBS, I am indebted to the support of Colleen Kenyon, Sarah Trudeau, and Caroline Budnick, who have made my work in the Education Services department feel meaningful and impactful. I am excited to continue my work in both journalism and public media this fall, where I will serve as a news intern at New England Public Media in Springfield, Massachusetts. I hope to continue learning all that I can in the years and stories to come.
