Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Dear Diary: Easy, Breezey, Beautiful People

I sat down one afternoon in early April, 2013 to put to paper my own personal feelings on a life-changing year at The Breeze, JMU's hugely successful and mega-award-winning school newspaper . Those thoughts were never published. One year later, with increased perspective on both my time in college and my potential career path moving forward, I reveal those thoughts here.


If players play and coaches coach, then I suppose it must be true that writers need to write. And so it is with a heavy heart that I will attempt to put into words the life I have lived for the past year.

Yesterday was my last day as sports editor with JMU's The Breeze, a publication which many of you know by now that I have become intimately intertwined with. I have lost track of the number of times over the last year I've texted a dear friend something along the lines of "I can't, tonight. I have budget."

Most people don't seem to understand the time commitment my job requires. After all, it's just a student newspaper, right?

But the Breeze is so much more than that. It's a dysfunctional family of narcissists and humble-pie eating, nose-to-the-ground workaholics. There are straight-edged kids and drug-addicts; country boys and city slickers; bombasts and pencil-pushers; those committed to relationships and those committed only to getting as sloppy as possible on any given Saturday. And though we are all extraordinarily different, like any family, we are bonded through a common thread: A love and devotion to a cause, much older than any of ourselves, that is equal parts startlingly relevant and dangerously archaic.





Tucked away in a sacred corner of the Breeze opinion page is a throwback to JMU's namesake president. "To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression." -James Madison, 1800.

Inside of every journalist is a fire that burns continuously, a fire which can never be rained on, snuffed, or otherwise put out. It's a burn, a yearning to uncover and present the crux of a given situation, be it the search for a new president or the dismissal of a pre-med student from the football team. It's a mindset that can't stand harsh injustices or even simple unfairness, and anything that lies in between. It's a fire that drives writers and editors alike to push through and fuels real journalists through the lean or unpleasant times.

I witness all that and more, on a daily basis, in my peers. I can feel the heat radiate from behind their eyes as they gear up to write that big story. I see passion in every move, behind every word. Agree or disagree, it's something that I sometimes overlooked or forgot to have the utmost respect for. It's pure. It's beautiful. And it's a student newspaper.

Somewhere between this student-run newspaper and, say, a CNN newsroom, things seem to go haywire. I won't speak for every professional journalist, but it feels like for every real, honest, and devoted writer out there, there could be 100 more that are corrupt, biased, lazy, uncommitted, dull, or just plain incompetent. They aren't interested in the purism that seems to burn, still brightly, in the young, unyielding faces that I spend my every day with.

And for a year, for one brief, painstaking, troubling, loud, frustrating year, that was my glorious privilege to experience.





Of course, all the things I just said about my coworkers do not apply to me. It took a remarkably short time as an editor (and, proportionally, a remarkably large amount of red ink, fired at me from the acrimonious tip of one Torie Foster's pen) to discover that this bout with journalism would be met with only mixed success. You see, journalism is accompanied by a set of guidelines that must be followed without exception. That's counter-intuitive to me. Rules are meant to be broken, if only for the sake of rhetorical asymmetry.

And so I part ways with my AP Style guide. I can't say that I will miss it. For a young writer with so much to say, it truly did hold me back, I can say with 100% certainty. In fact, if you're a Breezer reading this, you're probably already pulling your hair out over the serial commas and undoubtedly popping some blood vessels over other stylistic things I prefer. I love run-on sentences. I won't apologize.

What I will miss, without question, are the people. There are very few people I've ever met that I've considered to be family, but each and every member of the Breeze means something particularly special to me. Farewell Columns will simply never allow enough space for me to wax on as I'd like to.



I won't be seeking out a job in any sort of traditional journalism field, of that I can all but assure you. My talents and interests lie far too unilaterally opposed to the narrow processes that constrain my writing, but don't mistake my disinterest for disrespect. This is merely two entities realizing they can't be right for each other and recognizing their irreconcilable differences. I'm not meant for journalism, and journalism was never quite meant for me. Of this, I feel confident.

I'm not certain what my future holds. I've got a lot of wild, hair-brained schemes -- plans to build media giants, plans to write books. I don't know how much of it is really possible; I'm not sure if any of it is possible. But even as I part ways from my fellow journalists now, I hope they realize that our goals are, and always have been, perfectly aligned.

We all want to change the world, one truth at a time.

My path is just a little less proper.