and to strive for accuracy, no matter how many times I had to reread something or sift through pages of documents to triple-check statistics. I can’t count the number of times I peeked over at reporter Jamie Smith-Hopkins, who sat directly across from me, to ask a pestering question (though you would never know from her reactions how annoying I really was).
But it’s no secret that newsrooms all over the country started transforming. Sun staffers sat in the middle of it, watching journalism become an amorphous conglomerate of newspapers and ads and Web sites and blogs. As someone who grew up in the Internet age, I loved being able to combine the traditional journalistic skills I learned in college with the nifty tricks that came with being an avid Net-surfer and product of Generation Y.
As rapidly as the industry evolved, however, I saw my own outlooks changing. Clearly the valuable skills I learned from journalism had become part of a toolbox that I would carry with me through the rest of my life, no matter where I ended up. Working at The Sun helped me see the world in a different way. With each story I covered, I began to realize that the world needed to change and that it was my duty to help see those changes come to life. I learned that despite the vast body of knowledge and skills I had gained as a reporter, my toolbox needed to grow to effect the kind of change the world needed.
I cried one day as I watched an editorial assistant box up her belongings after working 20 years at the paper — the same assistant my colleagues and I had bickered with over food and fashion just a few months before. She had just gotten the news that her job was terminated, and she needed to leave the building immediately.
How was it fair? I couldn’t help but ask myself over and over. How was it that just a few months earlier, I had shared Friday potluck lunches with her and
other staffers in the Howard County bureau of the paper? Made history with hilarious quotes memorialized on the now non-existent Post-it note quote wall in the Columbia office?
I ended up packing my own box just a few weeks later, as I became another product of massive layoffs. Memories washed over me as I looked around the downtown newsroom. I thought back to that first summer on the business desk. I chuckled to myself when I realized that the desk I was packing up from, as an Anne Arundel County government reporter, was right where the business desk used to be.
At 24, I had already felt what it was like to get my dream job, then to be ‘‘involuntarily separated’’ from it fewer than two years later.
But as I packed my first real job away in a small cardboard box, I knew I could be nothing but grateful for what I had experienced within the walls of 501 N. Calvert St. I learned how to learn. How to feel. To experience. To sometimes just accept the world as it comes but other times do everything I can to try to change it.
I met some of the most hard-working and talented people I know at The Sun. I made some of my closest friends there.
And although I have made a giant leap, expanding my toolbox with the legal career I never imagined I’d be pursuing, the fire that journalism sparked inside of me will never die. I know that asking one extra question can make a world of difference. I keep a pen in my hair at all times, just in case something unexpected comes up.
I still refer to the first sentences of all my writings as ‘‘ledes.’’
But perhaps most important, one thing will stick with me, whether I’m a reporter or a lawyer or none of the above.
I will always live by the mantra: ‘‘Light for all.’