Notes on Journalism… and unrelatedly, the Emerging Church
My brief experience with journalism last year taught me something. I don’t like fast-paced deadlines. I think it would be fine if an article or two was the only thing I was working on, that way I could devote my whole attention through organizing interviews and actually writing the thing. But when I do it as an added on thing, on top of my schoolwork, I always end up feeling frustrated. That happened again this week. Part of it was that I had no idea what I was writing about. All I heard was there was some sort of meeting with all these different student groups that have acronyms that I hadn’t quite figured out yet. So I went in to my first couple interviews having one idea of what the article would be, and then it ended up being something quite different.
It was an exciting topic I realized afterwards… but another frustration was that I’m supposed to pretend to be objective. I don’t think there is any such thing as being objective, and pretending to be so is useless. The words I choose to use, the lines I quote, the organization… all these things are very subjective, and would have been different if someone else wrote them. I would much rather be more open with my own role in the process of writing, not in an overbearing way, but in a natural, here’s what I think, sort of way.
Another thing, to switch topics real quick… I don’t really know what to say about the emerging church-bashing that’s going on. I’ve always been a bit skeptical, thinking that they are appealing too much to how people are now instead of expecting them to change, but that can be said of many movements. I haven’t had any real intimate aquaintance with anyone in this movement, so in that respect I don’t know how they would feel about this… but I do think the movement has gotten so broad that you can label just about anything “emerging” and you’d be fine. It also goes hand in hand with the term “postmodern” church.
Maybe, for the sake of having precise language, it would be good to change the name. but I don’t know if that is going to cause the individual churches to change at all. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
Journalism
If someone told you that writing is the same no matter what field you are in… they lied. I’ve always loved to read, and the flip side of that is writing, so because of being well-versed in language, I would often get good grades on papers and things for school. However, in the last couple of years I would just write something and take it for granted that it was “good.” Then I ran into some criticisms that I took extremely personally… it meant that I really couldn’t write! What was this!?! I had been masquerading all these years?… but after my initial reaction of dismay, I decided to change that and allow the criticisms to make my writing better.
In the midst of this growing process, I have gotten the opportunity to write an article once a week for my local newspaper. Here is a link to the first article:
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/argus/index.ssf?/base/news/
1209752457288840.xml&coll=6
But even though I am now “published” for the first time ever, I’m not as proud of that fact as I would have been a few years ago. I know, that while my article was okay, it wasn’t great. But, it’s a learning experience, and I hope to improve in further weeks. I’ve already written one for next week’s column, and that one feels much more comfortable to me. But writing for a newspaper is much different than writing for a school paper, or even a blog. Every medium is different, I’m finding.
