from Ellen

Hi everyone!
Below is my final piece, which Kathy asked me to post. I want to work on it a little more, so I may repost a second draft, but in the meantime:

Sitting here in a nearly empty newsroom, on the last night of daily production of a newspaper for which I have written over the past two years and for which I may never write again, I cannot pretend to be able to untangle my objective relationship with journalism from my subjective relationship with it. My future is wholly uncertain right now--I do not know which school i will be attending or even which continent I will be inhabiting come September, and I am also in the process of re-evaluating my professional goals. After six years, four newspapers, seven jobs and hundreds of articles, I am trying to discern whether or not journalism is the best, smartest and most responsible match for me personally and professionally. I am not ready to abandon it just yet--far from it--but it's a question that has come up as I am forced, more and more, to deal with my impending entry into the Real World and all of its pragmatic concerns.
Horace Greeley once said that "journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it." Over the past six years, journalism has killed me in innumerable ways. It has meant late nights and early mornings, countless sacrifices big and small. I have felt the impotence of knowingly committing myself to a field that is shrinking before my eyes, the shame and anger of seeing my stories torn apart by anonymous commentators on the internet, the exasperation of being edited. I have had to ask extremely difficult questions and have likely ruined more than a few people's days. I have been forced to confront and report on many of the world's injustices, as well as come to terms with my own limitations and flaws as a writer, thinker, reporter, perso. I have been, at various times, exhausted, tested, frustrated as hell.
But journalism has, as Greeley observes, kept me alive. It has inspired me, challenged me, changed me immensely. It has forced me to interact with and understand all kinds of people, often people whose life experiences, values and opinions differ greatly from mine and who I likely would never have come in contact with otherwise. Last fall, for example, I wrote an article about Juan, a deliveryman for a Chinese restaurant on the Upper East Side who was being exploited by his boss. I found myself talking to and becoming incredibly attached to someone that I probably would never have even met if he weren't a source for my story.
But beyond all that it has given me, journalism keeps all of us alive--often metaphorically and sometimes literally. Journalism is putting your finger to the pulse of humanity; it is listening to and retelling countless people's stories. It is an incredibly optimistic and humanistic undertaking in that it is based on the notion that people matter, and that telling their stories is important.
In politics, progressivism is defined as the belief that problems can be fixed and governments can fix them. Journalism is, in this way, a truly progressive concept: at its core, journalism exists based on the belief that things can be changed, and that people can change them.
On the very first day of this class, Gabriela asked a question: What are journalists for? I readily admit that I am nowhere near anything resembling a succinct or complete answer to this question, but I think I'm getting closer. We are here to order reality, taking all of the information about a given event, person or subject, parsing it down to what's most important and packaging it in a way that is accessible to the public. We are here to use our power and our words and our voices to speak for those who have none of these things. It is our job to to organize and interpret and chronicle the world so others can change it. This is an immense responsibility.
It is not, I have come to believe recently, a journalist's responsibility to always be objective and detached. The journalists who truly inspire and affect me--Mike Davis, Anderson Cooper, June Jordan--violate every rule that journalists are meant to follow. They are anything but dispassionate, actively engaging with their subjects and their audiences. When Anderson Cooper broke down crying on live television during his coverage of Hurricane Katrina, his tears revealed more about the crisis than any sound bite could have. When June Jordan interprets proposition 209 through the lens of her experiences as a black woman, the issue becomes all the more real for the reader.
This is not to say that journalism is perfect--in fact, it's the opposite: Journalism is an imperfect concept existing in an imperfect universe, and in some ways, it amplifies the world's inequality. The people who are voiceless and powerless are also the people who have less control of and access to the media. But the best journalists believe in at least attempting to mend these problems, and journalism rests on the idea that exposure and agency and things that should belong to everyone.
I am sitting here in this empty newsroom at the end of a rough night and an even rougher semester, looking out the eighth-floor window at a sky that is just beginning to show the magenta and orange of sunrise. I am sleep-deprived and hungry and, to be honest, slightly delirious, but can't help but find a metaphor here. Journalism is like the sun: essential, illuminating, life-giving, vital.

also, if any of you have any advice or comments, i'd really appreciate them. As I said, I'm not entirely happy with what I ended up coming up with and am looking to rework it, so if any of you have any ideas, let me know!