We Are Journalists.

An impromptu trip to Tennessee awaits me for the weekend. Alex's grandmother died yesterday morning, so we're heading up there for the funeral.

Hopefully I'll take some pretty pictures of the autumn leaves.

Anyway, I stumbled upon this nifty place yesterday: We Are Journalists.

It's a Tumblr of editors, reporters, copy editors, page designers, bloggers and other journalists. Each one writes a short blurb on how being a journalist is completely worth the shitty moments of being paid less, having unhappy comments spat at you, the sleepless nights and everything else in between.

Reading each one makes me proud and sad at the same time. If I wasn't uber afraid of my career before, this just confirmed it. But goddamn, I love what I do.

Here's my attempt to writing one, photo TK:

My commute consists of walking from my bed to my couch. I live off my MacBook Pro and my shitty iPhone 3G for emails from my editors. I completed five internships, four of them unpaid, before landing a freelance gig with my current employer. I still work for free with a publication just so that I can add two extra lines to my resume. AP style is my lifestyle. I've interviewed celebrities, business owners and educators, and I've gotten tons of free shit just because I'm in the media. After all of that, I still feel the most prideful when thinking about my article involving a local hero who had the balls to chase a group of bank robbers for ten miles in his own truck.

Despite my recent pay cut and all the criticism thrown my way, he is the reason why I'm still attempting to make it in this industry.

I am a freelance journalist.

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I also felt like I needed to say this, too, but I couldn't find a way to incorporate it with the graf above:

I was a sales rep for an inbound call center making decent moolah until the company closed two and a half years ago. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, because if the company didn't close, I would probably still be there, still hating the job but doing it because of the money. I love what I do, and even though I'm not making as much as I did with my old job, I'm definitely not reprinting a resignation letter every week anymore.

I'm a freelance journalist.