When I first joined the Daily Northwestern in the fall of my freshman year, I didn’t really join because I liked journalism. I had done a bit of work for my high school newspaper, but it wasn’t what I invested most of my time in, and it wasn’t what I thought I wanted to have a career in. I joined for a pretty stupid, pathetic reason: writing was the only thing I’ve ever had something resembling natural talent in, and as a trainwreck freshman who desperately sought validation from my peers, I figured writing for the Daily was a decent way to get that.

I spent my first two years or so at the Daily trying to figure out if I even wanted to be a journalist, and flailing from desk to desk looking for my niche at the publication. Eventually I found it in The Monthly, which I started writing for in the spring of my sophomore year. After my time reporting for the campus and city desks, I found that I was much more capable in the field of art and entertainment. The longer page spreads benefitted my notoriously long-winded writing style and inability to stick to the word count provided to me. I started getting genuinely excited by the stories I was writing, instead of thinking of them as bullet points on my checklist for the week.

It’s common for Daily Northwestern staffers to say that they learned far more working for our student publication than they ever learned taking classes at Medill. I definitely agree with that sentiment; I learned a lot about writing and reporting from the mentors I’ve had at the Daily. But the most important thing I learned from the Daily, and the Monthly specifically, is that being a good journalist isn’t really the same thing as being a good writer. That can be a really important part of journalism, but it’s not what makes you a good journalist. What makes you a good journalist, and what makes what you write worth reading, is empathy.

To be clear, I do not mean empathy in a generic “present both sides of a story equally” way, because if this past year has shown anything, it’s that many times there is a clear right side to a story. I mean as a journalist, you need to prioritize treating your subjects as humans with lives and concerns outside of feeding you quotes, which sounds obvious but is incredibly easy to lose sight of.

My junior year, I took a class called Journalism of Empathy, and it was a deeply baffling experience. I spent the entire quarter wondering why it took Medill three years to offer me a course that taught its students something as basic as “covering marginalized people requires empathy.” These were lessons we should have been learning in our intro classes, which have a tendency to portray journalism as a transactional experience to students who don’t really know better.

I learned the importance of empathy in reporting not from any of my teachers in Medill, but from the Daily. In the small world of student journalism, where you go to classes with your sources, it’s easier than ever to see how mistakes and carelessness can hurt the people you’re reporting on, but also how good, empathetic journalism can positively affect someone. I’ve grown to comprehend that along with the newsroom at large, as leaders at the paper have worked hard to improve how we interact with and serve our community. That’s part of why the paper’s reporting on the protest movements on campus like NU Community Not Cops has been so great and so vital, because the reporters understand more than ever how important empathetic reporting can be.

It’s easy to think that this doesn’t really apply to arts and culture writing, that it only matters when you’re covering politics or activism, but trust me, empathy is more important than ever in the writing we do for The Monthly. When you’re profiling someone, be it a famous comedian or an up and coming student band, empathy for your subject is vital for making a profile pop and doing justice to the stories of people who trust you to tell them. You have to put heart and soul and love into a profile, or it’ll just end up flat and empty. The best writing from the many talented journalists I’ve had the pleasure of editing are filled with empathy, with appreciation for the talents and the lives of the artists that they cover.

When I think about my time working under the Monthly editors who lead the magazine before me — Charlotte Walsh, Crystal Wall, Jane Recker, Madeleine Fernando, among many others — as well as my time as editor, I’m most proud of the times I felt a genuine connection with the people I profiled, of the times that I anguished over every single word I put on the page because I wanted to do right by them. When you’re a journalist, you have so much power in the way you portray people and present them to your audience, and that’s something you need to be aware of no matter what you’re writing.

This letter isn’t necessarily my goodbye to the Daily; no matter how many times I think I’m leaving this publication, I always find some reason to come crawling back (cue “Brokeback Mountain” quote). But after producing five issues of the Monthly, it’s time to pass on this responsibility to the next great phase of editors. I couldn’t have achieved anything in this position without the help of the people who trusted me to do this job: our incredible editor in chief Marissa Martinez, probably the most talented journalist I’ve ever met; the managing editors who oversaw my work; and especially the design editors Catherine Buchaniec, Emma Ruck, and Carly Schulman, who laid the stories out on gorgeous spreads every month. This magazine has given me a lot, and I exit it with a lot still left for me to learn. But the Monthly taught me what it really means to be a journalist, and especially what it means to be a great one, and for that, I’ll always be grateful.

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @wilsonbchapman