My name is Britta Hanson, and I am a recovering news junkie. Back in my glory days, I predicted Al Gore getting the Nobel, read The Economist’s obituaries religiously and regularly cited my favorite celebrity as Nicholas Sarkozy. Journalism school was the natural progression of my obsessions. And on my very first day in Medill, when they asked where we saw ourselves in 10 years, I unflinchingly said, The New York Times.
Unsurprisingly, Medill kicked my arrogant ass. Unlike high school journalism, which mostly involved me applying a vicious red pen to others’ articles and composing diatribes on school policy, I was now required to do the real legwork of “getting the story,” complete with interviews and fact-checking and misery.
By December, I had had enough. Luckily, I was about to use winter break to make my first pilgrimage to Broadway (my fanaticism for the arts was even more ridiculous than it was for the news). While I was there, I would pay my respects at the Times. Just the sight of that noble institution would hopefully jolt me to my senses and prevent me from sinking into the rabble of Weinberg.
To raise the stakes even further, my Medill freshman adviser, who had no idea I was about to defect, contacted an old reporter friend to give me an insider’s tour. Before I knew it, I had a date with the Times.
When I arrived, I felt as if I was entering not a building, but a shrine. As my guide escorted me through the storied hallways, I felt surrounded by everything I loved: sophisticated writing, thoughtful intelligence, deep, even profound knowledge.
That said, my primary emotion became revulsion. The day I visited was in fact, Christmas Eve, yet the office was nearly full. Some of the most talented, hardworking newsmen in the country were forfeiting time with their children to molder in ignoble cubicles, slaving away for pennies and bylines. Despite the nobility of their enterprise, if this was as good as it got, what was the point? Notably, the only people absent from this dismal picture were the arts critics, whose flamboyantly decorated corner was pointed out with a small sneer.
After my tour concluded, we went to the swanky cafeteria to chat. To my great distress, he wanted the insider’s scoop on Medill. How did I like it? Was it all it’s cracked up to be? Caught between school loyalty and the desire to bitch, I only smiled awkwardly and stumbled through a vague explanation of the curriculum and a somewhat more sincere description of its rigor. I left the building in a daze of awe and disappointment.
“It’s all over,” I texted a friend melodramatically.
I declared my journalistic ambition deceased, and by Spring Quarter, I was an official, unusually cynical English major.
But there is a final twist to the story. Which, I ask you, is more ironic: getting a private tour of The New York Times after essentially pledging eternal abhorrence of journalism, or finding my niche in criticism at the end of my Northwestern career, and then writing an article about the experience?
– Britta Hanson
