The game of journalism is finding a way to live in the past, present and future, simultaneously.
It’s so much fun, until it isn’t fun, but then that part is over and it’s fun again.
Something like that.
To live in the past is to remember the moments, the names, the people and things that made each day. Local news stories are the sentences that make up the history books.
To live in the future is to keep a long list of story ideas, of sources and possible leads to break up the breaking news.
To live in the present is to be offered a new beat and asked to get the first article in as soon as possible.
But that’s the game and it is one I love to play.
The Communities beat, as it was described to me, is so perfectly made for me that I couldn’t believe it was real. However long it lasts, I will be grateful for it.
I will also be grateful that my editor didn’t hear the sounds of excitement I made when we got off the phone. They were, you could say, unprofessional.
On the surface, the stories of Black, Indigenous, immigrant and Francophone communities could be quite straightforward. You tell the stories of these communities. And yes, that is a wonderful goal, the opportunities for sharing and learning about another culture can only encourage the foundation of the welcoming community and really, learning of another culture is incredibly interesting.
But I think that if I did that, I would be writing for me, and people like me. That is, a white settler-Canadian who speaks French, but only to children and pets.
That told me that I needed to make sure these stories were ‘for’ the communities that I was writing about, not ‘of’. That each member of these communities, often under-served and underrepresented in traditional media, should hear the stories that are important to them, not just looking through a microscope at them.
My greatest hope is that I disappear from the story entirely. Except for a little style here and there, which includes, to the utter dismay of my mother, starting sentences with ‘and’ or ‘but’ and using far too many commas.
It may be a constant juggling act, moving effortlessly through time, but this chance to light the beautiful and interesting communities of Sudbury, and let them shine in their own way, to raise their concerns, to share their joys and their pain, is such a gift to me.
I’m still so pleased to see at the bottom of each article:
Jenny Lamothe is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter at Sudbury.com. She covers the Black, Indigenous, immigrant and Francophone communities.
