Week 6 — A sense of belonging

This week has definitely been an unusual week for me at Newsday. The reporter who usually comes in at 5:00 a.m. to cover any breaking news in the morning is on vacation, so they have been tapping into the reporting interns (i.e. me) to fill in for him. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I drove into the Newsday office bright — well, actually, dark — and early to do the 5 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. shift, and it was just grueling. The work itself wasn’t that hard — apparently, not a lot happens in the wee hours of the morning — but just being here that early, messing up my sleep schedule, was  hard. By noon, my head was pounding and my eyes were closing. On the other hand, I really did learn a lot about how reporters deal with breaking news, which so far I hadn’t been able to explore very much because my projects have been more long term. I enjoyed seeing the interaction of reporters with police officers and PR people, and the importance that is placed on checking and double checking and triple checking facts that to anyone else would seem somewhat trivial, but to these people it’s crucial to get it right. On one of these shifts, we had a case where an Amber alert was sent out to Nassau County, waking a lot of people up, but when we called Nassau police, they said they hadn’t sent the alert and that we should contact Hempstead P.D. We did that, and they hadn’t sent it either, telling us to call the state police. We did that, and they hadn’t sent it either. We spent two hours just calling the same three police departments over and over again, trying to find out who had sent the alert, and if there was, in fact, a child’s life in play. It was puzzling, it was frustrating, but ultimately felt really gratifying once we discovered what had actually happened — that someone in one of the departments accidentally sent the notification out. I found the experience super useful, and definitely felt that I learned a lot in the training.

As I’ve been doing these shifts, however, I realized something else: that I felt a pretty strong sense of belonging in Newsday now. I could chat easily with fellow reporters and editors, and they all seem to like me and trust me. Since I showed myself willing and excited to undergo training and help out in any way, they definitely have increased my workload and are sending me out to a wide range of events, such as breaking news press conferences that they would normally send out other reporters to cover. I In fact, I just heard that one of the stories I was working on, about a cardiothoracic surgeon who came into the country illegally but then went on to graduate from Princeton and Harvard, was going to be a cover story for one of the paper’s special magazine issues, which I’m pretty excited about.

I’m also going to take this post for a little personal reflection. After doing the early shifts, I definitely earned the trust of the editors —  perhaps too much so. Suddenly, they were asking me to do two more of those shifts next week, which I agreed to. Then, on one of those early shifts, they were about to ask me to work overtime, despite  barely having slept at all to get up in time for 5 a.m.

I managed to work my way around that last request by seeing the message “too late” and having them find someone else who could do it. But then, on Thursday at 3 p.m., one of the editors marches up to  me, saying that I would be working Friday at 7 a.m. — not a dreadfully early shift, but an abrupt shift change nonetheless, with very little warning ahead of time. This is very out of the way, and I really did not want to work the shift because I had already made plans and messed up my sleep schedule. One of my coworkers told me that once editors get comfortable with you, they start yanking you around to make sure their schedules worked well, and urged me to be firm and refuse to do it. She said that women in the workplace usually felt as if they had to volunteer for more unseemly tasks that men did not feel they had to do, and that I should stress that they had not given me enough time to make the necessary arrangements for such a drastic shift change. I wasn’t looking forward to this conversation, and ended up not having to argue it because in the end they found someone else, but it was still amazing to see that my coworker was right — if you don’t learn how to say no and respect your boundaries, it’s very easy to get caught up in the feeling of having to do more to create a good impression and move ahead in your field, which has really scary implications, especially for a woman.

As a final reflection about sexism and ageism and all other isms, I was at a press conference on Thursday, and at the end I approached the PR representative to double check the spelling of one of the speaker’s names. He looks down at me, pulls out his phone, and uses the most condescending tone to say: “You know what I used to do when I was a young reporter? Anytime I would want to find someone’s name, I would simply Google them, and they would show up!” And then he proceeds to show me how to use Google on his phone. I was outraged and didn’t know what to say, and didn’t feel vindicated until we were interrupted by another older (male) reporter who had come up to do the same exact thing I was doing — double checking a name. If I had been a man, or older, or an older man, I’m certain he wouldn’t have talked to me in the condescending way he did. I think this is something I am going to have to get used to as I enter the workforce.