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I never intentionally set out to become a journalist.

Outside of a brief flirtation with the student newspaper in middle school, journalism was an idea that veered far off the paths I knew. My image of a journalist was someone who spent the long nights hunched over a typewriter, smoked cigarettes, and stalked City Hall.  Think Clark Gable in It Happened One Night or Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday.  The only people who disrupted that paradigm were Sway, Suchin Pak, and Gideon Yago, back in the time when MTV covered both news and entertainment.  Despite their relative coolness, journalism didn’t carry any more cachet to me than that.

I spent my youth playing video games, downloading anime, reading glossy magazines and listening to pop music.  Occasionally, I explored space and science, and read a lot of books about social justice, sociology, and advertising.  I found my voice as a fiction writer and an activist before finding my future career in an online community dedicated to anti-racism.  But even through all of those changes, I didn’t really consider journalism as a career path.

A writer? Sure.  But journalists were something else. My whole identity up to that point had been decidedly anti-establishment.  How could I claim to be part of the media when the media routinely got things so wrong?  I spent most of my time critiquing racial representations in the media, specifically analyzing how news articles perpetuated stereotypes about people of color.  I wrote long articles about diversifying the press corps and how journalists advance neo-colonialist narratives, never thinking I’d join those ranks one day.

My critiques caught the attention of the Poynter Institute, and I was asked to become one of their Sense-Making Fellows. I carved out a comfortable niche – being the person outside of the journalism world that discussed the goings-on of the media machine.  Still, despite surrounding myself with the folks who created news, I did not see myself as a journalist.

Then, The American Prospect asked me to do a reported piece, outside of my usual 800 word opinion pieces.  The topic interested me: Are farmer’s markets a viable substitute for food infrastructure in urban areas?  I went, reported the piece, and came back with a new skill set. More reporting gigs poured in, some cultural items and some breaking news.  After a year of steadily increasing work and more and more bylines, I realized that while I still may consider myself outside of the realm of journalism, the pieces I produce for Raw Story, Slate, and Spin tell a slightly different story.

Still, I rebelled at adopting the title. I’ve spent my life as an activist, so ,of course, I chafed at all the restrictions placed upon journalists.  Is life worth living if you have to shroud your opinion is some deference to some imagined idea of objectivity? If media bias exists, why can’t we admit that and start looking at a new standard?

I never found a good answer to that question. But I found myself developing the same problems that journalists, particularly journalists of color, face over the course of their careers.

Walking into new newsrooms still fills me with trepidation.  Even when I’m invited, I still feel ill at ease, as if someone rubbed salt into my skin before setting it back on my body.  I never feel pedigreed enough, old enough, white enough. After six years working in media, I still feel like I’m playing an elaborate game of dress-up.

Using the online space as an intermediary allows for people like me to make space for ourselves.  And I came into the media world at a perfect time–the onset of new media broke down all kinds of walls and barriers, while throwing the very idea of who gets to claim the title of “journalist’ into flux.    While I often look at my patchwork resume as a disadvantage, unconventional backgrounds aren’t as much of a hindrance as I believed.

I am sure I missed some great stuff in journalism school.  But I learned tons about interviewing and tough subjects working the red carpet for a national tabloid.  From a dignity perspective, my old job cutting subs at Blimpies was better than working the red carpet for no byline and a couple hundred dollars.  I came away with a few celebrity-based party stories–and learned how to be both fearless and tactful.  After asking Nick Cannon when he and Mariah Carey were going to have a child in front of a hundred other people, sitting on the other side of The Stream’s Orange Couch from the Bahrani Finance minister and asking him tough questions about the misdeeds of the government was a breeze.  (For one thing, a dis by the Minister of Finance wouldn’t get picked up on TMZ.)

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