In the past, I’ve always felt most comfortable as a written reporter, not as an audio or visual journalist. I grew up loving to read and write, and it was my passion for rhythm, lyricism, and syntax that led me to journalism. But my Mitchell year has pushed me to expand my reporting skills by experimenting with other mediums; this semester, in particular, I’ve enjoyed working on video projects for my Television and Broadcast class.
One of our key projects this semester is to create a live television newsday. That means producing a 12-minute television program that includes live headlines, presenter segments, stories about local news in Limerick, and even a weather forecast. Our entire masters group of about twenty five people has been hard at work on this project, with each person taking on a specific role. I’ve been appointed the “desk editor,” or the editor in chief of the project, which sounds more glamorous than it is. In practice, my role is to assign specific stories to our journalist teams, provide feedback on their work, and coordinate between various staff members — I think I’m in a dozen WhatsApp groups for this! This project has certainly been a challenging experiment in leadership and teamwork, but it’s also been a familiar and welcome process — a throwback to my time as an editor for my student newspaper at Duke, where I had to oversee student staff members and perform many similar tasks.
One of the best parts of being involved in this project is the opportunity to explore local issues in Limerick through the eyes of our journalist teams. We are covering a variety of topics relevant to this city, including the growing popularity of the sport of padel in Limerick, a new theater production put on by UL’s theater society, and the planned expansion of a greenway for cyclists in the city.
Developing these stories has enabled me to pay closer attention to Limerick and its people. That causal connection between reporting and heightened attention is part of why I originally wanted to become a journalist, and why I continue to love this particular, often peculiar work. The meticulous work of reporting encompasses many tasks — observing, recording, empathizing, interrogating — but, I think, at its most fundamental level, it is about the art of paying attention. It’s about developing a type of intimate, sustained knowledge that is, in a way, a kind of devotion, a form of love. As I once wrote in a column for my student newspaper, “Care for a place or a person demands that we slow down to look and see.”
Looking and seeing. That’s how I’ve spent much of my time as a journalist in Limerick, trying in small ways to become the type of writer who closely attends to the world around me. After all, I can only take readers on paths I myself have trodden, to sights I have seen and savored, to the places I have once inhabited. One of my favorite passages on writing comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Message, in which he figuratively positions the writer as a person standing at the edge of a forest tasked with creating a map of that area. “The figure is you, the writer, an idea in hand, notes scribbled on loose-leaf, maybe an early draft of an outline. But to write, to draw that map, to pull us into the wilderness, you cannot merely stand at the edge. You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover that the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains.”
If there’s one thing this year in Limerick has taught me, it’s that reporting and writing — and dare I say, all of life — can never be fully realized when you are simply standing at the edge of the wilderness. You have to see the thing and live it. You have to dip your hands in the stream. You have to walk the land.