Welcome to the first ever post on my blog “Leighah Ledes,” where I share my student journalist experiences in hopes of lede-ing my audience through their journalism education.
The first step in every journalist’s career is getting interested in journalism.
I specifically remember when considering changing my career goals in high school saying to myself, “I would never want to write articles for a living. That sounds so boring.”
Growing up, I wanted nothing more than to be a zoologist and work in a zoo. I love animals and learning and researching about them then writing all about what I learned.
Throughout my education, the love for writing was there, but the act of just writing itself wasn’t enough to justify a career in it.
When I reached high school, I still wanted to be a zoologist, but I was told that pursuing it wasn’t feasible and I would be paying a lot for school then working a job that couldn’t surmount to that debt - now if only that person knew what journalism paid.
I began to get worried about what I would do for the rest of my life and began looking at careers that were more money focused than what my passions actually were.
At some point the summer after my freshman year, I came across a series of documentaries that discussed the history of teeth and the existing problems people have of actually taking care of their teeth. There were some interesting pieces of footage such as a woman who was so afraid of going to the dentist that she was supergluing her teeth back into her gums.
So, naturally, I wanted to pursue dentistry. Therefore, 15-year-old me decided what I needed to do was become an Oral Maxillofacial Surgeon.
It was simple. I could study dentistry and surgery for years - always having more to learn. Then I would eventually become the real deal and work in the trauma unit of a hospital.
How could I possibly get bored of people coming into the ER with their faces smashed in from a car accident just waiting for me to fix them?
Years later, I am a senior and the question is still itching in the back of my mind - is this really what I want to do for the rest of my life? Dentistry?
I had been randomly assigned to take a journalism class that year, and though the articles I wrote were so bad I have since deleted them out of existence, I had come across my passion.
In the class, we did a number of video projects focused on sharing news or what I now know as “features” of our high school.
In these projects we got to learn more about the community that exists within the school and how it connects to the town itself.
This concept of community building and being a voice for that community is what got me hooked to journalism. I was able to bring in that love of doing research and being a voice for people, but, again, writing articles every day for a living sounded so boring.
But how could it be when every article is something new? Every article is a conversation with a new person or reuniting with someone already known. Every article tells a new story in a new way. Every article presents a story and I get to be the one who tells it.
I don’t have to be the one who fixes the woman who superglued her teeth, but I can tell her story.
I don’t have to be the one to deliver Southwick Zoo’s new baby giraffe, but I can tell its story just as one of Framingham State University’s alums did.
On the surface level, journalism wasn’t what I wanted, but digging deeper I have found it is exactly what I always needed. And for so long I failed to see that.
There is more to the story of how I fell in love with journalism, but in the end it’s a career where I can combine my love for never-ending learning, writing, and most of all the community in it - whether of the location of the article or the community within being a part of the newspaper itself.
I hope reading this you can relate to my journey of finding my love for journalism - or maybe this is your sign. Feel free to send in your stories of how you discovered journalism was the right career choice for you.
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