Now that it’s really officially official, I am honored to share that I am one of the three SPJ Freelance Fellowship recipients this year, as detailed in this press release.
“These three outstanding journalists embody the spirit of freelance work. They’re resourceful, resilient and deeply committed to telling important stories,” said SPJ Freelance Community Chair Stacie Overton Johnson. “We’re thrilled to support them as they bring their talents and perspectives to MediaFest25.”
I have to remember to buy Stacie a drink in D.C. I’m uncharacteristically speechless.
“But Donald, I thought you were a professor!”
I am a professor, and I love teaching. I am an author, and I love writing. I am a journalist, and I love reporting. I never said a life of words was easy, uncomplicated, or single-minded. It’s more like spinning plates while riding a unicycle.
I left full-time reporting in 2018, but I never left journalism. My work has continued, writing news and features and even doing photojournalism for newspapers, websites and magazines over the past seven years, not to mention the nonfiction segments of this Patreon. I’ve reported for McClatchy, Hearst and Lee publications; for magazines like Inside Higher Ed, Current and Feast; and I’ve done regular beat reporting for my former newspaper and for the St. Louis Labor Tribune, which has employed me for the past several years as their chief Illinois correspondent on labor issues. This has enabled me to keep reporting on politics, as labor and the political sphere are never far apart in Illinois.
This is not some side gig to keep me alive in between professorial paychecks (though it fills that role nicely). I believe that if we are to teach journalism, we should keep practicing it in some form. The profession and practice keep changing, faster for journalism than in most fields, and it’s really important that we keep pace with the current state of the industry as we guide the young people who will take over for us.
That, and I really love it.
Those of you who’ve followed me for a long time know what a hard and scary decision it was to leave my newspaper and dive into academia. I likened it to jumping off the high dive without knowing whether there would be water in the pool below. Part of that trepidation was the sadness at giving up a profession I loved, using my words to inform, investigate and maybe make some small difference in the world.
Freelancing allowed me to keep the parts that I loved, to choose the assignments I wanted to write, and jettison the parts I didn’t want, like chasing ambulances, calling bereaved families, and work hours and situations that my defective body frankly couldn’t manage anymore.
MediaFest (or the SPJ National Conference or whatever we’ve called it over the years) has always been high tide for this journo-love, and I’ve never come away from the conference without a pile of new ideas, both for my own work and for my teaching. If you are a journalist and were on the fence about attending, I can’t recommend it enough. I was very sad at the possibility of having to miss it this year for financial reasons, and delighted that the fellowship will now make it possible for me to attend.
While there, I hope I can sneak over to some of the museums I’ve never seen, like the National Museum of African American History and the Holocaust Memorial. I’ve hit all the usual sites, like Ford’s Theater and the major memorials, which I’ve detailed on this Patreon and photographed. If anyone has any suggestions of new sites I should visit, please let me know! I won’t have much spare time around the conference, but I love D.C., and sightseeing – learning – is always a priority.
Once again, thank you to the good folks of the SPJ Freelance Community for their generous support, and thank you to all you Patrons who continue to make my mad career possible.
