President's Column

Cynical optimism -- it's a journalism thing

SPJ Journal Spring 2008

President’s Column

By Jodi Cleesattle

I got to thinking about what I love most about journalism, and I realized it’s the peculiar blend of cynical optimism I learned being a reporter and editor.

The optimist part comes from the fact that, when you’re a reporter, or a journalist of any sort, you learn something new every day – probably more like five times a day, or more. With every source you interview, every story pitch you hear, every meeting or event you cover, you hear a new story, gain a new perspective. It might just be some interesting little thing one person in one corner of the world is doing. It might be some larger, more meaningful-in-the-larger-scope-of-things thing. But it’s something you can learn from, something you didn’t know about the day before. Oh, you could choose to be jaded about it, but I find it sort of inspiring.

How many jobs pay you – not much, admittedly, in most journalism gigs – to be curious? How many jobs encourage you to just go out there and find out what’s going on, to ask pointed questions, to be cynical and skeptical and to tease out the truth? How many jobs, other than in journalism, give you the freedom and flexibility and privilege to help shape what people are talking about and help define what issues are important?

Really, when you think about it, it’s pretty darn cool.

It’s also what I love about SPJ, and why I’ve been a member for 22 years. (Man, that makes me feel old.) SPJ brings together journalists from all career paths and all backgrounds, most of whom share an optimistic outlook on how to make journalism better and most of whom share a healthy skepticism about the status quo. Whether you meet other SPJ members at a chapter board meeting, at a panel discussion, or at a happy hour event, you hear interesting stories, gain new perspectives, and learn fascinating things you didn’t know the day before. You share a common passion, but also a natural tendency to question and challenge and argue.

For me, at least, that makes for a heck of a lot of fun.  And, in my book, that makes SPJ pretty darn cool, too.