"I feel like I'm entering this profession that could look completely different 10 years from now. It's really exciting and it's cool to get to be curious all the time."
For her first professional journalism job, Laura Robertson was adventurous. She traveled all the way out west and then some, relocating from upstate New York to Nome, Alaska (population 3,700 and not accessible by car) to write for a weekly community newspaper, The Nome Nugget.
Laura just completed a one-year stint there and she's coming back to New York for a new job. We thought it worthwhile to talk to her about her time as an early-career journalist. She's this week's guest on The Journalism Salute.
"I cover(ed) a little bit of everything from gold mining to dog sled racing to subsistence hunting to high school basketball" she said. "Climate is really important and subsistence is really important here. That's hunting, fishing, and berry picking and eating through food that's on the land."
Living in Nome poses a lot of challenges because of its isolation. You often wake up in darkness and for a brief time, there's only light outside for four hours a day. Laura talked in the interview about her various story assignments and how she managed her mental health while there. She acknowledged that a welcoming community helped.
"Nome is the hub community for the region and because of that, there's a lot of transience," she said. "There are a lot of people who move in and out. People are used to new people coming in and people leaving. But the community is really tight knit and so you have to make an effort. But people have been incredibly welcoming to me."
What did she do to make the effort?
"Listening a lot," she said. "Spending a lot of time being quiet and listening."
Laura is someone who is up for a challenge. She is a multi-talented graduate of Princeton University who speaks three languages and whose hobbies include singing both opera and jazz.
Before coming to Nome she worked on Princeton's student newspaper and also wrote a freelance investigative piece for New York State Focus about how medical contractors were profiting in New York's jail infirmaries without properly treating patients (she knew about this because it was topical in her hometown). That won the Nellie Bly Award given to an early-career journalist by the New York Press Club.
"It was really hard to get these corporations to talk to me," she said. "I think I had the advantage of being a young woman and student journalist who people didn't take as seriously and that worked in my favor … It was a really ethically complicated story and a story that I really wanted to get right."
The desire to get it right is one component of why Laura does what she does. One of my favorite parts of most interviews is asking how journalism shaped the person and how they viewed the world. This was Laura's response:
"It is so easy in this world to really narrow your horizons and only see the things that are directly in front of you. But journalism, because it's all about meeting people who are really, really different than you and really different than each other, often. And you meet people and they say such interesting, weird things that you didn't expect.I think that journalism is just ... it keeps you from shutting down and it keeps that like curious kid part of you from dying ... and it. keeps you really focused on the world around you. I really value that. because I think that it's really easy to lose that."
Hope you'll listen to the interview.
If you’re a teacher interested in integrating The Journalism Salute into your classroom, please reach out - you can e-mail me at [email protected]