When people ask if I’ll leave journalism, I wonder, instead, if journalism will leave me.
When I got to Northwestern, I climbed the “journalism ladder” in hopes of telling stories larger than life. I would talk to all kinds of people to understand and share all kinds of perspectives — and do it alongside the best of the best. As I climbed, though, I’d hear over and over that I need to “get out before it’s too late,” that this ladder wouldn’t lead anywhere. The industry is dying, they’d say. But I’m not scared that the ladder leads nowhere, I’m scared that it disappears beneath me while I’m still climbing.
As an Egyptian-American, I worry the ladder is disintegrating even faster for Arab and MENA journalists, students and professionals. Never was this more clear to me than during the Deering Meadow encampment my sophomore spring. Despite constant, round-the-clock coverage, there were stories about MENA students, but none by them. I sought to change that.
There is a lot of power in journalism. When you wear a press badge around your neck, you decide who gets a say. That is something we need to yield well and carefully. We are watchdogs, but if we’re not careful, gatekeepers, too. What a shame it would be to spend years fighting to get into the room, only to turn around and close the door behind us. It’s this fear that pushed me to stop looking for spaces to be part of and start building something of our own.
Starting the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists’ Association chapter at Northwestern was my way to try and keep the ladder from disappearing beneath us. At NU, a lot of time is spent scaling ladders with the ultimate goal of reaching this mountaintop that seems to get further and further away.
I used to see this only as another added pressure — climb or get left behind. But the thing about a ladder is that it has to exist in the first place, and not everyone gets one.
When I was a freshman at The Daily, a space like AMEJA didn’t exist. Four years later, this spring, I received an email from a Medill freshman who’d been seeking a community for someone like her and had heard about AMEJA from her academic advisor.
She made me see the ladder differently.
The whole time, it was a privilege to climb. The real pressure is making sure the ladder still exists.
Because, what’s the point of climbing if there’s no one left at the top and no one coming up to join you up there?
The way to have an impact at The Daily, and beyond any newsroom, isn’t to race ahead, but to pick up where others left off and leave something sturdier behind for whoever comes up next. I now get to pass AMEJA on to student journalists who are my inspiration to keep climbing.
To take from my favorite movie, “The Lion King’s” Rafiki, “If you wanna go fast, (climb) alone; if you wanna go far, (climb) together.”
Email: [email protected]
X: @HabashySam
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