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Naivete, and the will to change the world
© St. Petersburg Times They came into the room one by one, with resumes in hand and hearts full of passion and ambition. You've got to be this way if you want to change the world. These kids -- I call them that, although some were in their early 30s -- want to change the world. For two days this week, I was in New York City, interviewing students who want to be reporters at the Times. They attend what is perhaps the nation's most prestigious school for would-be reporters, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. (The trip was also a short ride down memory lane. Straight from college, I studied briefly at Columbia. I quit soon after classes began. I just had to go my own stubborn way. But let's skip the nostalgia.) The students at the journalism school are sent by their professors to write stories about New York's frayed, hardscrabble neighborhoods, beyond the fashionable parts of Manhattan. In these other neighborhoods, the notion of the melting pot is daily tested. Anglos, blacks and Puerto Ricans have had to make room for immigrants from the rest of the Americas, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Asia. You do not walk away from encounters in these places wondering what the people who live in them have done to make their lot so difficult. You wonder what can be done to make their lives better. You write stories about how they cope. You end up following the dictum of the brilliant but impossible H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore columnist who said it was his job to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Walking those streets in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, those students are learning firsthand about the afflicted. They are willing to go to extremes to get this education. Several had borrowed thousands, up to $25,000 or $30,000, to pay the enormous tuition while living in hyper-priced New York. They'll be in hock until middle age, and it won't be easy to dig out from under. Unless you wake up one morning as Diane Sawyer or Dan Rather, this profession will not make you rich. I interviewed the students in a small, blank room with a window at the end that overlooked Columbia's imposing campus. I met one student who spoke Farsi, another who spoke Latvian, a young woman who worked for the government-run Chinese news agency, still another who had been in the Peace Corps in Cameroon. They had freelanced for big-city newspapers or worked for next to nothing at small papers in small towns. They all had one hope -- to launch a newspaper career at a larger, more established paper like this one -- and write stories that would make a difference in the lives of their readers. This sounds embarrassingly naive. It is. The truth is that, at least at the start, they'll be writing about property tax increases and sewer bond issues, beauty queens and high school sports stars. But naivete, like passion and ambition, has a lot to recommend it under the circumstances these students face. Naivete saves them from the impulse to give up in this near-idle economy, where jobs in newspapers, as in many other fields, are hard to find. The students all handed over packages with resumes and clips. They asked for my advice. The best I could tell them was to apply to as many papers as possible, and to wish them well. I did not tell them what ran through my mind constantly, that they are admirably confident. When I was their age, I didn't have a shred of it, and still sometimes it eludes me. Most of the students will graduate in May. By then they should know if they have a job here or elsewhere, whether they will have a desk, a phone, a local map and a computer, all the tools they need to change the world. -- You can reach Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3402.
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Times columns today Mary Jo Melone John Romano From the Times Metro desk Mary Jo Melone |
