Writing the Next Chapter

Rebuilding a Journalistic Identity*

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash

I’m not one of those journalists.

Maybe you know the ones.

They’ve won prestigious awards or have a string of big-name outlets they’ve published in or teach journalism at a prestigious university or spent a decade covering crime or science.

The ones I pretend not to envy.

I used to think I’d be one of them someday.

It wasn’t the prestige I wanted, though, let’s face it, that’d be nice. 

I had originally wanted to do criminology and criminal justice research that would be used to prevent suffering due to crime. I came to believe I could do more good as a journalist, bringing the research of others to the world with my reporting.

Journalism, as embodied in The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, appealed to the young idealist I was and captured my imagination: journalism’s first obligation being the truth, its first loyalty being citizens, its being a discipline of verification… All of it.

What I wanted was to do good journalism that would facilitate change and development in criminal justice policy. I figured that those markers I mentioned above—the awards, the publishing credentials, the teaching gigs, the experience—would indicate I’d succeeded.

I think I showed some promise back at the beginning. I was a smart and decent writer. I had some good ideas that turned into good stories. After an undergraduate degree in Criminal Justice & Public Policy where I also wrote for and edited the news section of the campus newspaper, I went to j-school at a decent college, went back and edited my university campus newspaper, then went to work as a reporter/photographer at a community weekly newspaper. 

The plan was to start working my way up from smaller papers to larger papers, gaining general assignment reporting experience before transitioning to science reporting, and then finally to a gig specializing in covering criminology and criminal justice research.

Things should have been looking up.

Instead, things were looking down

I moved to and worked in a town with one set of traffic lights. Or was it two? I don’t remember, but a “quick” trip to Google Maps Street View shows there are at least two sets of lights now. What seems to be missing is the newspaper, which occupied a storefront back then. In its place is a tanning salon. 

The newspaper’s Contact Us webpage now lists the Toronto address of Postmedia, the conglomerate that swallowed all of those community papers. If I remember, tomorrow I’ll look into whether they have a bricks-and-mortar presence in that tiny town anymore. But I probably won’t remember.

Two receptionists worked in the front office. Then there was the ad salesman in an enclosed office with the graphic designer at a workstation outside.

I worked in a two-person newsroom tucked almost in the very back. There was me and my editor. I remember it as little more than an extra-wide hallway with our workspaces side by side and our backs against one wall. The space in front of us served as a hallway between the front offices and the backroom that was stuffed full of aging archive copies of the newspaper.

We didn’t use word processors; my editor thought we’d get sloppy. So we typed our stories into columns on a blank page in QuarkXPress, or simply “Quark”, the layout program of choice at the time for community newspapers. We edited each other’s pieces by hand on printouts, keyed in the corrections, and copied and pasted stories into newspaper layouts. 

My editor gathered her things and left at a more-or-less reasonable hour most days, having finished her work. I’d look back at the old iMac on my old-fashioned wooden desk, a half-written piece open on the screen. 

Executive function touches all aspects of newspaper work. 

In interviews, I couldn’t take notes fast enough, so when I got back to my desk, I’d spend three times as long transcribing quotes from recordings. 

At my desk, I couldn’t concentrate on my work enough, so I’d spend four times as long writing a story as it should have taken. 

Designing stories in Quark, I couldn’t prioritize my time well enough, so I’d spend hours tweaking page designs until I was satisfied when I should have settled for good enough.

I was slow and scattered in a job that needed me to be fast and focused.

Finally, I couldn’t bull my way through anymore.

I finally said: Enough 

Looking back, I can see the effects of the five head injuries I had already sustained up until that point:

1. As a toddler, I climbed furniture and fell, smashing my head on an old-school stereo.  

2. In the schoolyard, friends hoisted me into the air and I came crashing headfirst into the ground. 

3. On the dojo floor, a black belt student with 100 pounds, half a foot, and two belt levels on me picked me up and dropped me on my head. 

4. In a washroom, I fell backward into a bathtub near the end of a night of drinking as an undergrad. 

5. (The washroom thing happened twice. I don’t remember how.)   

This list (“The List of Times I Hit My Head Before The Big One”) originally had six incidents on it and I kept it in my head, but I’ve forgotten one. Before I could forget more, I wrote the rest down. 

Each of these essentially just got shaken off because I wasn’t knocked unconscious and didn’t suffer “obvious effects” from them, other than a headache.

A doctor would tell me many years later that I probably suffered a concussion with each of those knocks to the head.

We didn’t know better. For instance, we didn’t know about “post-concussion syndrome” (PCS), a relatively rare condition where symptoms of concussion persist beyond the days it takes for most people’s concussion symptoms to fade. 

Now, I see post-concussion symptoms that came after “getting my bell rung” all those times. I see the vision problems and the executive dysfunction. I see the working memory deficits, time blindness, task initiation problems, attention/distractibility problems, and on and on.

I didn’t see those things or their link to half-forgotten knocks to the head. I just thought I was lazy or lacked willpower.

My doctors and I recently explored the idea that I might have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but when I reviewed my old report cards (thanks for keeping everything Mom!) from before I turned 13, there was no evidence of the disorder. In light of that, my psychiatrist and I agreed that ADHD seemed unlikely, especially when PCS also explained my symptoms. An ADHD diagnosis wouldn’t have changed his suggested treatment anyway.

While I believe these were milder versions of how PCS and executive dysfunction affect my work now, maybe I just wasn’t cut out for the work.

Hard to say.

What I should have done was explore my legal right to reasonable accommodation.

I bet one of those journalists wouldn’t have quit.

I did.  

Back to school

I adjusted the plan: acquire an advanced degree in the field I wanted to cover and work freelance, selling articles about crime research to newspapers and magazines.

I went to grad school, to a Master’s program called Criminology & Criminal Justice Policy. 

Alongside the core coursework and part-time gigs as a teaching assistant and research assistant, I studied crime news and theorized how the Internet could change it for the better. 

(In short, I argued that the Internet allowed a larger “news hole”, facilitated social networking with higher quality sources, and other elements that should make for higher quality crime journalism that didn’t privilege official sources, focus on individual-level explanations of crime, and so on. This was nearly 15 years ago when virtually all the literature on crime news focused on old media like newspapers and television.)

Grad school gave me the relative freedom to accommodate my executive dysfunction, though I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. I took my time (allowing for concentration and speed issues), committed everything to paper or digital forms (externalizing what I couldn’t hold in working memory), worked very long hours and drank too much coffee (countering task initiation… unhealthily).

After grad school, I knew I needed a financial cushion as I learned to freelance. 

A friend got me an interview where he worked, on a small team of technical editors in the product security department at a big tech company. This led to working as a technical editor myself.

I adjusted the plan again: build a financial buffer before going freelance and putting ideas I’d worked on in grad school to use while covering criminology and criminal justice.

On the road to that, I started running into problems as a technical editor that were similar to the ones I ran into as a reporter/photographer. 

When working against the clock, I would catch simple style errors in the first ten pages of a document, but my concentration would fail me and I’d miss subsequent instances of the same errors in the last ten pages of the same document. 

I could spot and recommend solutions to complex issues in technical reports, but it would take me longer than other editors on the team.

I won’t go on, but I could.

At the time, I thought it was a combination of just being inexperienced at the work and the expectations being unrealistic to begin with. (They were unrealistic, but that’s not the point.)

Searching for solutions, I turned to a nearly forgotten skill: coding.

Writing code to augment my executive functioning

I’d taken computer science for a couple of years in high school, so when I started to recognize the repetitive nature of a lot of the editing that took me forever to get through, I wrote simple macros that helped me spot more instances of specific kinds of problems. 

I hadn’t written code in a long time at this point, so I was particularly proud of the code I wrote to handle acronyms, a common pain in the ass even for an editor with normal executive functioning. 

For me, handling acronyms across the entirety of 20- to 30-page documents was torture. 

Acronyms have to be handled properly:

1. Unless it was on an approved list in our house style guide, each acronym needed to be spelled out the first time with the acronym following in parentheses.

2. Subsequent instances could use the acronym alone.

3. Acronyms that didn’t appear in the style guide needed to be listed in an appendix with their meaning.

4. And so on.

My concentration would lapse enough that I wouldn’t always catch acronym problems among all the other problems I had to watch for, so I wrote code that recognized acronyms in a document, checked them against the list, etc., etc., and flagged them with comments for me to follow up on.

It was all simple pattern recognition and conditional logic, nothing like what we can do now with tools like Grammarly or Hemingway, but I was still proud of it and the other features I coded up. 

I should note that none of my code made corrections; I still had to make decisions. I had to decide whether a potential problem it flagged was a problem. If it was, I corrected the copy or queried the writer. 

I later came to think of these coding projects as cognitive prosthetics.

Much like replacing an organic leg lost in a car accident with a mechanical/electronic leg lets an amputee walk again, I was using code to let me perform more like someone with unimpaired executive function.

As much as these “cognitive prosthetics” helped, they didn’t help enough. My performance was still substandard, as my team lead never let me forget.

Meanwhile, external pressures caused ripples through the company as our competitors surpassed us in the marketplace. Rounds of layoffs began.

I didn’t have the financial buffer yet.

Then I hit my head again

Walking across a patch of ice one night, my feet slipped out in front of me and the back of my head slammed into the pavement.

It knocked me unconscious for at least a few moments.

The ER checked me out and discharged me with instructions to rest in a dark room for a few days and a list of symptoms to watch for. I don’t remember anyone warning me that the symptoms might last longer than a few weeks, but they did.

Constant, unrelenting headaches. Soft tissue damage and pain from the top of my head down to the small of my back. Dizziness. Vision problems. Concentration problems. And executive dysfunction that couldn’t be rationalized away.

I was on a long-term medical leave from this head injury when the massive rounds of layoffs in the company caught up with me.

I lost my job.

I couldn’t work.

The plan burned to ash and bitterness as years passed.

I eventually found a new job because I had to

There was no plan beyond getting through the day. I convinced myself that “my symptoms” had faded. We had a toddler and a new baby and I saw no other options. I started to build a big wall of denial around my symptoms.

Coincidentally, when I decided to “go back to work,” my old campus newspaper needed a leader, this time as part of the permanent business staff. So I applied and gratefully accepted the position.

The newspaper I returned to was not the thriving one I’d left a decade before. This newspaper was still small, independent, and nonprofit, but now it suffered from declining readership and advertising sales. I wanted to be surprised, but I’d been watching the industry and saw no reason for this tiny newspaper to escape industry trends. 

I resorted to my hacked-together “cognitive prosthetics” almost from the beginning, writing code that supported my activities, everything from scripts that timestamped a log I kept of thoughts, plans, etc. to other scripts that prompted me and kept me on track while I worked. I became so comfortable with this personal suite of code that I sometimes forgot why it was there.

When I started, our website was little more than an organizational afterthought to the physical newspaper. The underlying WordPress backend hadn’t been updated in years. Among my nebulous duties, I was responsible for keeping “the website” going, whatever that meant on any given day. That was far from my only responsibility, but it often felt like it was all I was able to do.

There were a few other staff members who were passionate about the website and its potential as a medium. We talked about how to improve it.

Within a month or so of my starting, four of us put everything else on hold so we could focus on updating the website.

It was summer, a quiet time for a campus newspaper in those days. Most of the staff wouldn’t start until September.

We worked in tandem from our respective workstations in the otherwise empty office, calling for help or feedback as we needed it.

We mapped and updated the website’s many plugins, purchased and transitioned to a new theme, troubleshot and fixed things that broke because of other things we’d fixed, and brought the website up to date with what the organization could afford, which wasn’t much.

We soldiered on. Over the next several years, I worked with new staff (who turned over every academic year, by design) to keep the website going. And we did it. The website did go down, but we usually had it back up within a few hours. Our longest period of downtime, when readers couldn’t access new content, was a day or two.

My other responsibilities all required high levels of executive functioning too, such as supervising the business department, strategic planning, and coordinating Board of Directors activities. Near the end, I became responsible for supervising the Editor-in-Chief too.

The entire time, I collaborated on and pushed for transitions to digital-first workflows, working to drag this 70-year-old legacy newspaper into the modern era.

The entire time, I pushed myself past the limits imposed by my PCS. Headaches, vision problems, soft tissue damage, and on and on. I compensated with caffeine to keep me moving through the day and alcohol to help me sleep at the end of it. It was idiocy.

The entire time, my health suffered. Eventually, so did my performance. As much as I may, at times, want to blame it all on the PCS, I know I also made choices and adopted attitudes and behaviours that made everything worse. 

I sank into depression and anxiety and bitterness. 

Finally, I couldn’t do it anymore 

I took a stress leave that I thought would be temporary. I learned how I’d been working myself to death trying (and failing) to compensate for the PCS that had never actually faded. I learned that it never would.

Things got dark, but I had a lot of help from family and community services. The darkness faded.

I’ve learned that my executive dysfunction is so bad I couldn’t see the extent of it. I’m still not sure that I can, but I’ve been taking down the walls of denial I built. 

In a way, it’s been like waking up to find that most of a decade slipped away while I slept a shitty, shitty sleep.

I never went back to that job, instead becoming, as they say now, underemployed.

The journalist I am

I am learning to manage my limitations.

Few of the symptoms I describe above have gone away. I still contend with daily headaches, vision problems, soft tissue pain, and executive dysfunction. I spend most of my days managing these symptoms with medication, physiotherapy, occupational therapy techniques, and code that I’ve written. 

For the last year, I’ve been writing on Medium.

I work a couple of hours per day (all I can handle) in a kind of journalistic rehabilitation program of my design. I enumerate the new crime journal articles that come out every day, curate a list of five of those articles per day, and share them with an audience. 

Occasionally, I write summaries of an interesting or important study. 

Eventually, I will report on new research, interviewing the researchers and uninvolved academics in the same field. I’ll work at the pace dictated by my condition, not by a production schedule. Tools will augment my limitations, and I won’t feel shame.

Explaining Crime launches in a handful of days. It’s a Substack newsletter I’m writing to help people explain crime to their audiences.

A book is in the works, a writer’s guide to understanding and writing about crime statistics.

I’m also working on another project that I can’t talk about yet.

The principles of good journalism are still my touchstone, even though becoming one of those journalists isn’t in the cards. 

I tell myself that’s okay, and I’m slowly coming to believe it.