Three Anniversaries Worth Celebrating

My previous blog post focused on three anniversaries that took place over the course of the past week; specifically, the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks and the Benghazi terror attack, and the first anniversary of the derailment of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings with decades-old, vague sexual assault allegations.  Since all three of those anniversaries brought back a lot of bad memories, I decided it might make sense to focus on an anniversary that people across America can look forward to celebrating as well as two personal anniversaries.

This week, I celebrated three special anniversaries. All Americans should join me in celebrating the first anniversary, Constitution Day. 232 years ago today, representatives from 12 of the 13 colonies signed the nation’s founding document at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.  As a testament to the Founders’ wisdom and vision, the Constitution has demonstrated an incredible resiliency. As I explained in one of my very first blog posts, “the framework of the Constitution has served our nation well for nearly a quarter of a millennium.”

The second anniversary, my birthday, happens to overlap with Constitution Day. Today, I turn 24 years old. For the record, I was born at 29 weeks gestation; with a due date of late November. Think about this. I ended up surviving despite the fact that I came into the world 11 weeks before my due date yet, Beto O’Rourke seems totally cool with mothers aborting their babies the day before their due date.  Since liberals love to rely on personal anecdotes when making policy decisions, my story and the success stories of several other premature babies should definitely cause the left to rethink their support for late-term abortions.

In addition to my birthday, I celebrate another personal anniversary this week; specifically, my tenth anniversary since my career as a writer unofficially began.  Ten years ago this week, I walked into my first high school newspaper meeting. Before I began writing for the school newspaper, I had written quite a lot for entertainment purposes.  More often than not, my work ended up pleasing an audience of only one: me. While I definitely did not categorize myself as an unexperienced writer, my decision to write for the school newspaper marked a venture into uncharted territory.  Rather than writing for just myself or a small group of friends and family, I now had an audience of at least 1,000 students and roughly 100 faculty and staff. For my first assignment, I took on the task of interviewing the new Superintendent of Schools.  Long story short: the story never got published because the Superintendent barely lasted a month into the school year.  The article has secured a place in the ash heap of history; since the school deleted all of my work saved on the school computer not long after I graduated.

I obviously did not like hearing that the article I worked so hard on would not make it into the paper. For a while, I thought about quitting. Looking back, I definitely made the right decision by not quitting. At the second school newspaper meeting, I decided to take on a story about upcoming construction at the school.  I would end up writing several articles about the construction project throughout my four years of high school. 

For my first three years on the school newspaper, I primarily picked my stories by choosing from a list of topics thought up by the editorial team written on the whiteboard.  During my senior year, I served as a copy editor while maintaining my duties as a staff reporter. As a member of the editorial team, I had the opportunity to pitch story ideas at the editors’ meetings.

After graduating from high school, I decided to pick up where I left off by joining the college newspaper.  Depending on my editor and what section of the paper I wrote for, I either had the opportunity to pick my topics or pick them from a list of potential topics in the weekly e-mail. The frequency of my articles increased from monthly to weekly; although I did not necessarily write for every single issue. Those hoping to read my articles, or any articles for that matter, had the option of picking up a hard copy of the newspaper at newsstands all around campus or checking out the online version. While my college had about 5,000 undergraduates, about four times the population of my high school, I have a hard time believing that every student at my college actually read the school newspaper; although it seems like a safe bet to assume that more people read the articles that I wrote for my college newspaper than the articles I wrote for my high school newspaper. 

Just five days before graduating college, after production of the school newspaper had ceased for the school year, I began writing for this blog. I decided to test my skills and my ability to come up with new ideas by shooting for three articles a week. After all, for the first time in my life, I did not have to juggle school work and my writing; allowing me to devote most of my energy to creating content for my blog.

After sporadically writing for online conservative publications for several months, I had the amazing opportunity to participate in the National Journalism Center’s spring 2018 internship program. A project of Young America’s Foundation, the NJC gives interns the chance to work for well-known media outlets in the Swamp for twelve weeks. We all worked at our respective outlets Monday through Thursday and met up at NJC headquarters in Reston, Virginia on Friday; where we heard from guest speakers who held a variety of careers in media and journalism.

I spent my internship at the News Analysis Division of the Media Research Center, where I produced content for the NewsBusters blog. At this time, my output increased from three times a week to multiple times a day most of the time. For the first time in my writing career, my responsibilities included creating and embedding videos to accompany the articles. While I did not know exactly how many people read my articles, I can determine their popularity by looking at the number of shares they received on Facebook. My most popular articles have gotten more than 10,000 shares on the social media giant.

Since my internship ended, I resumed writing for my blog and continue to work as a contributing writer for NewsBusters. Over the past ten years, I have learned quite a few lessons that I would like to share:

1. You can never stop improving. I had initially thought about including a lesson about the importance of not letting pride get in the way of progress but I figured that this kind of ties into that. Looking back on the very first story I ever wrote for a school newspaper, it sucked. If I had used my first story as a writing sample when applying for a job over the past two years, I probably would not have gotten hired. For example, the story talked about how the renovation project would bring ten new science labs to the school. Yet, the article had no mention of the location of the new science labs; I just assumed that the project would consist of the renovation of the existing science labs. Apparently, it did not occur to me that the renovation project would shift the science labs to a different part of the building. The creation of the new science and technology wing ended up dramatically transforming one part of the building yet my article did not mention that at all. The article did, however, find time to mention that “fixing broken clocks is very low on the priority list.” I obviously had quite a lot to learn about which information to include in the article and which information to leave out. While I have come a long way since ninth grade, I admit that I still have not reached my full potential as a writer.
2. Never give up. As I explained above, I thought very seriously about giving up writing for my high school newspaper after the first article I wrote did not make it to print. Many people tried convincing me to give up on my writing after I graduated from college; noting how it did not exactly provide a steady paycheck. However, my strategic patience paid off the second I received an invitation to participate in the NJC internship. Those hoping to make careers as writers will definitely face a lot of setbacks along the way but remember what the Steve Miller Band pointed out in the song “Jet Airliner,” “you know you got to go through hell before you get to heaven.”
3. You never work alone. While this piece of advice obviously does not apply to my personal blog, it applies to just about every other writing position I have held over the years. Dating all the way back to my days on the high school newspaper, I had colleagues and more importantly, editors. I ultimately served at the pleasure of my superiors and unlike most people working a government job, I had and have no immunity from dismissal. More often than not, editors have a clear set of expectations and failure to meet those expectations could result in my dismissal. The same would likely apply to any other job. In my case, an infinite number of people could take my place.
4. While no writer can honestly say that they have never made a mistake, some mistakes have more consequences than others. Mistakes in print-only publications will live on forever while I can go back and fix mistakes made in online publications, depending on the website. Even with grammatical and spelling errors interfering with the quality of the writing, most readers can still understand the point. Other mistakes have a profound impact on the reader’s ability to comprehend the text. During my sophomore year of high school, I took a class trip to the Swamp.  I ended up writing about the experience for the high school newspaper, where I made a pretty serious mistake that altered the meaning of the article. According to my article, “After viewing Dinosaurs 3-D in the Museum of Natural History’s IMAX theater, students were free to explore either the Museum of Natural History or another Smithsonian great: The Museum of Natural History.” I meant to say the Museum of American History. Instead, I mentioned the Museum of Natural History twice. While whoever edited the piece probably should have noticed that faux pas, his or her name did not end up on the article. Mine did. My work serves as a reflection of me and that mistake and all mistakes of this caliber make me look kind of sloppy. Fortunately, now that all of my work gets published exclusively online, I have the opportunity to go back and fix mistakes if necessary. To paraphrase the 33^rd President of the United States Harry Truman, “the buck stops here.”

With ten years of writing under my belt, I would like to thank all of those who have taken the time to read my work and/or offer me advice on how to improve. I look forward to seeing where my career takes me over the next ten years.