I was 17-years old when I was first asked the question “Why do you love journalism?”
I had been sitting in a one-on-one interview with Mawa McQueen, Aspen Colorado’s only Black restaurant owner. After a remarkable discussion on Aspen’s local representation via mom-and-pop shops and McQueen’s plans to enhance cultural representation through restaurants, McQueen gazed at me kindly and posited that question.
“Hannah, why do you love journalism?” McQueen asked.
I was moderately thrown off guard. As a budding journalist working for my high school newspaper for four years, I had never been asked such a question about myself by an interviewee.
I opened my mouth to answer what seemed like a straightforward question for an aspiring journalist, but froze; my mouth ajar. My mind ran into so many directions of thought:
“I love journalism… to tell the truth?” I thought. No, that wasn’t it.
“I love journalism to ensure the public good?” Nope, too cliche, that wasn’t it either.
What was it about the industry that I loved so dearly?
I began to think of where my interest and love for journalism started: Gloria Steinem. I resonated with her not just for her work in the 1960s liberation movement but also for her perspective on journalism, and her famous quote:
“People before paper; stories before statistics.”
This prompted me to think about the articles I had written up to that point. In writing articles with Aspen’s Indigenous foundation, I learned firsthand hundreds of years of stories and beautiful history of the Indigenous: a presence forgotten in a past of mining and industrialization. McQueen had just shown me how one person could single-handedly spark diversity and change in a town.
After these encounters with community members in my town I was able to use journalism to shed light on the inequities that remained under privileged noses, as well as the fervor that these individuals had in creating change.
I then replied to McQueen with the one-word answer, “People.”
I loved journalism because I loved people. For me, journalism was of course about integrous reporting and eradicating bias from news and political pieces. But most of all, it was about people.
McQueen did not just smile, she beamed.
“Good,” she replied. “We need more journalists who think that way.”
I think about this encounter often today as a 20-year-old journalist; a time when journalism has been deemed a “dying” industry.
Today, people have made a universal consensus that the romantic, mythologized trope of the journalist has died alongside print newspapers and magazines; that journalists sacrifice creativity for a paycheck, resulting in formulaic, short-form reporting.
Yet, I remain fiercely loyal to journalism, partly because it’s my passion but also because I believe my generation of young journalists can revitalize the industry and make my dream career possible.
In a world where legitimate news can be dismissed as “fake news” by some politicians and outlets like TMZ dominate Hollywood, journalists must be trained to defend their profession.
It’s up to journalists to fix a broken industry with ethics and human connection.
The reason I share this story in this column with readers, and especially other journalists, is to remind them to not give up on journalism and to especially not give up on human beings.
I implore journalists today to ask themselves the same question I was so fortunate to have been asked years ago: “Why do I love journalism?”
Journalists, use your answer as a compass, a gauge of sorts. If, indeed, journalism is a paycheck to you, or a vice to further a certain politically biased agenda, then I implore you to reconnect with why you personally fell in love with journalism.
Maybe for you, like myself, it was a human connection. Maybe it was to ensure the public good via unbiased news. Regardless of your origin story, I implore you to once again find it.
As a young journalist, I firmly believe in the power of journalistic writing and its ability to give unheard voices agency in this world and reconnect human beings in a time of such technological estrangement.
In my years of journalistic writing, I have truly learned that Gloria Steinem was right: above statistics or startling facts, people come before paper; stories come before statistics.
To all who read this, journalism is not dead. It is simply in metamorphosis to find itself again, and we journalists who love the industry will take charge to ensure that. I hope that we can slowly but surely remedy the angst of the collective against journalists.
To older generations of journalists, do not simply pass your torch to us youth. Hold onto your own torch tightly, and use it to light the torches of the aspiring budding journalists that look up to you.
“When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.”
— Gloria Steinem
