"I don’t know how you do it," said my brother Marcus, looking up at me from the laptop after reading my story on William Rogers. "I feel like I know him.""So did I," I said.
Sometimes I fluctuate between wanting to be a journalist because I’m good at it and I can make a difference, and getting back into public relations because, while it’s stressful, it’s less emotionally draining.
The drawback with PR is that I’ll have to compromise the amount of writing I do professionally. Like advertising, how do I go back to writing five-word taglines from 18-inch features?
During a recent conversation outside Kawasaki’s Bike Week booth, I told Bruce Barta, senior vice president at O’Leary and Partners, that it seems more fulfilling to influence 150,000 readers for good with a heartfelt story than to sell a product, service or an idea to two million people with a brilliant creative theme and well-placed advertising.
Ideological? Maybe.
At 7:26 on a Friday evening, waiting on a phone call from the EVAC Ambulance spokesman to confirm the details of a traffic fatality this afternoon. That will be a brief.
I just got off the phone with the guardian of a 17-year-old boy who was shot four times in January. His assailant was arrested last night and neither she nor her son knew; she was so relieved she wanted to jump through the phone and kiss me. That will be a story; even if he doesn’t call me back, I have her quotes.
Other than empathizing with her relief, I was unaffected by either of these stories. I worry that five years from now I will have become more hardened than I am now. I’ve become more hardened than I was a year ago.
I worry that if I stay in this business, I will eventually compromise the caring person I am when it comes to other people’s pain. I will always be affected on some level, but it might happen less.
I don’t want to be less human because of my job. Right now I manage to be more in spite of – or because of? – it.
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