You can take someone out of journalism, but...

Can you take the journalist out of the person?

I know it's not an adage, but with a number of SportsJournalists.commers now becoming former journalists, I was wondering what part of our journalism personas stayed with us in our next ventures. If you're still seeking work or are in college, that next venture can include your time on the unemployment line or in the college classroom or its online equivalent.

In other words, we may have left our work as journalists behind, but what part of that work do we still do? For example, do you use your skills as an investigative reporter to find out facts on the police beat? In the courtroom? Did you develop a disdain for covering sports after dealing with athletes and SIDs that hasn't left even if you no longer seek press credentials to cover the local team?

For me, I still have to use some of the fact-finding skills in getting questions answered when I ask customers information about how someone's account became overdrawn or where they made that "missing" deposit. Using those skills can often mean the difference between someone not getting a penny back from the bank because they overdrew their account a bunch of times or our finding out that a teller keyed in the deposit incorrectly and having to refund a fee as a bank error.

More importantly, however, I usually feel a need to verify things before I post them on Facebook or on Twitter, for example, following the two-source rule before reporting that someone has died. Or logging onto Snopes before forwarding along that popular story that has been discredited.

The question that opened this thread started coming to mind when I referred to myself as a reporter, even though I haven't written a journalism piece on deadline in over two years. In some ways, I still do a lot of the things we had to do as reporters. It's just that my work won't appear in tomorrow's Godless County Express nowadays.

 

I left journalism for PR/marketing, and my 15-plus years in my former career have been incredibly valuable to me.
I've also learned a lot about what-I-didn't-know-but-thought-I-did as a journalist.


Met a student not long ago who wants to do PR as a career, but she's not interested in business or economics classes. Good luck.