Trying on journalism for size

By Natalie Garcia
Special to chipsquinn.org

Posted: June 28, 2007

Natalie Garcia

In college, I studied fashion merchandising before I switched to journalism, the only major that seemed worth pursuing.

I went from wanting to stack shoes to wanting to uphold the public's right to information.

Now I don't know what I would be doing if I wasn't a journalist.

Yes, the pay is bad, and I still haven't figured out how I will keep my sanity with two weeks of vacation a year.

But it really doesn't take much to keep me happy here.

Bad days come and go, and I am constantly confronted with the fact that I am a young, inexperienced reporter.

Public officials placate me or ask me how old I am. I forget to ask an important question and am left calling the same source back again and again.

But in the end, it only takes one reader to express a shred of interest to make me realize why I come to work and care about journalism.

An adoption story I wrote caused a reader to revisit previous efforts to adopt. A concern over the lack of minority teachers at the local school district sparked some debate among readers.

The Visalia Times-Delta is a small paper, reaching a small number of people compared to many other papers in the country. But I don't care.

I have work to do here, and if only one person really cares about the issue I write about so be it.

It beats stacking shoes.

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