A colleague, who is my junior, and I were talking about our past lives as online journalists for a TV network. She was saying she missed it, the camaraderie and the achievements that we had, the kind of coverage that we did. She said she missed writing for an audience who would care about what she is writing about.
Writing with meaning. Writing about things that matter.
As I said before, we are writing for money now. Not our money but rather money for our readers–exclusive content that would make them money. It’s not writing with a noble purpose.
I think every writer at some point looks for the soul of what she is writing about.
I had quit that for a while. I gave so much of myself in that last job before this one that I got burnt out. I was headbutting government officials, the government, the world. The country’s problems were my problems. I was a walking mass of nerves. If my insurance covered my jumping out of planes, I would have but my editor strapped me to my chair and said, do something less wild, ok?
I was doing investigative reports. Knocking on doors upon doors, literally, looking for the people in the web of lies I have mapped out. I conducted interviews in the dark, in safe houses, having multiple phones with me just in case one of them gets bugged. I hung out in court houses, listened to court proceedings, pored over evidence and more evidence. I talked to people who were willing to give me evidence. We were almost there, almost sent the criminals to jail. They were indicted. Senators. Ring leaders.
Then it all came to naught. Things got reversed. It’s so tiring. Fighting for justice in this country is tiring.
And then I became a casualty of mergers and acquisitions. The parent company had done a series of bolt-on acquisitions that made my role redundant…even though it didn’t seem like it at first. But as a business journalist, I already saw the writing on the wall. I exited before it happened. After a couple years after I left, it did finally happen. All of them were shown the exit door.
Did I miss it? Yes, I do miss writing from the soul. Do I miss my former life? I don’t know. Maybe the burnout hasn’t worn off yet. The disillusionment has not worn off yet.
I was offered to write a weekly column in a broadsheet some years ago. My boss in HK said, why not? It would have been great marketing for my current company as well. But I turned it down, thinking I would not be able to commit writing that regularly. I may run out of things to say. As it turned out, I was right. It’s not that I would run out of things to say but I ran out of time. I don’t have enough time for everything. Especially in the last 3 years when I was running around with J. I barely had time for myself. A weekly column would have been a chore and I may just churn out something that would be subpar, with no real purpose or meaning.
I was watching this video of of a girl who quit her job to become a full-time artist. It was like her day job was sucking out her soul but she was doing the math and she stayed in her job year in and year out to be able to save enough, create a portfolio of work, gather clients for commissioned work, and students. Then she made the leap and was happy that she was able to do it sooner than she was thinking.
I completely sympathize with her. I was stuck in jobs in other industries for a couple of years before I made a jump to full-time journalism and not just dabbling in writing here and there. At that time I was writing on the side–to keep my spirit alive while I stayed in soul-sucking jobs to put me through graduate school.
Now years later I’m still working at home as a writer. Not that kind of writer that people are romanticizing about, like Hemingway or Nick Joaquin. But writer nonetheless.
Maybe I should restructure my colleague’s question: Do I miss writing about things that matter? Yes. Do I miss the former life of a mad-dash journalist out there in the trenches? Sometimes. What do I want to do to feed my soul?
Maybe I should write on the side. Of things that mattered.
I got an invite to write for a news outlet, a special report about healthcare. I haven’t done it yet because it required too much leg work.
I must pick my battles. Start small. Write in a literary magazine for a start while I write big stuff for my day job.
Oh, and this is the reason why I blog regularly. My writing sucks most of the time because I’ve been stuck writing for my day job for seven years. My writing growth was stymied. I regressed.
Here is something I wrote five years ago about this searching for the soul:
Long form journalism in the click-bait era
Let me tell you about the moment I realized I wanted to be a journalist. We had in our house a desk calendar from the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ). That calendar had a black and white photo for every month, which I presumed was used in some PCIJ story. I cropped those photos to use in one of my projects for xxx (subject) during my freshman year in college. And somewhere in my gut I knew I wanted to be a journalist after flipping through the pages of my finished project.
All The President’s Men and now Spotlight reinforced my desire to be and stay in this profession.
I cried at the end of the movie. The most poignant part of the film was when Micheal Keaton entered Spotlight’s office and saw the phones ringing off the hooks. He was probably expecting calls from angry parishioners and supporters of the Catholic Church (hence his surprised remark about the absence of picketers the day after the Boston Globe ran the story). But no, these were calls from victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by Catholic priests in Boston. These victims were coming forward to tell their tales, emboldened by Boston Globe’s investigative story on how the church covered up decades of sexual abuse. That for me was the most powerful scene–the reason why we journalists do what we have to do. Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) was right: you don’t focus on the individual stories because nothing will come out of it. You have to go after the system, the system that was so rotten that it has killed so many children who were silenced by shame, guilt and haunting memories of predators. And good journalism serves as a spark that would lead to the correction of that faulty system.
Sadly, dwindling advertising money and the audience’s propensity to gobble up “fastfood” news are whittling down the capacity of newspapers to carry the long form, good ol’ shoe-leather stories.
Keeping an investigative team is expensive. Running stories that may not bring you “hits” or mouse clicks is kind of hard these days. Doing investigative reports is exhausting, and at times you feel like you are alone in your battle. I’ve been there. Countless late nights interviewing sources undercover. Poring over documents and piecing together clues then hitting a brick wall. Sacrificing family life just to be able to bring out the truth to the public is painful.
But what keeps us journalists going? Mark Ruffalo has put it perfectly:
“They knew. They let it happen. To kids! Okay? It could’ve been you! It could’ve been me! It could’ve been any of us! We gotta nail these scumbags! We’ve gotta show the people nobody can get away with this! Not a priest, not a cardinal, or a freaking pope!”
“Spotlight” was devoid of histrionics that made the horrific story that was unfolding so palpable. It was a methodical movie but was a great thriller. It didn’t dwell on the heartbreaking stories of the victims, but by doing so “Spotlight” made each stories of those children more devastating.
Spotlight is an ode to newspapers and to the journalists dying to stay in the profession. To the journalists who fight for change.