FINDING YOUR ONBOARDING POINT IN HISTORY

Writing About WritingPersonal GrowthJournalism

1 Oct

A woman in a green shirt climbing aboard a blue train

This week I came face to face with one of the biggest fears I have in my ongoing (and hopeful) career change to journalism. That is, building a knowledge base and having reasonable confidence in it to the point that I can write authoritatively on a news subject.

Journalism will have different meanings depending on who you talk to. For some, it’s the practise of holding power to account. For others, it’s something that meddles intrusively in society and invades the rights of those with a vested interest in the privacy of their affairs.

For me, at its essence, journalism is the dissemination of information to the general public with a view to keeping citizens informed and engaged with what’s happening around them.

From an outside standpoint, putting my definition into practise sounds easy. Right? I’d argue that’s not so.

News doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The way we perceive (and report on) our world is built on context. Current events become past events. Past events become history. News then, you could say – and Alan Barth did say – , is writing the first draft of history.

With so much history, and therefore so much context, around every news subject one could be called to write about, where do you start going about building enough knowledge to write authoritatively and effectively? Basically, when a train is already in motion, where do you jump on?

Onboarding yourself onto history.

History is, within the bounds of a single human lifetime, almost infinite in scope. It’s laughably understating to say that ‘many things have happened’, and each of those ‘many things’ have influenced and shaped the course of many other things. History is a constantly-growing line of cause to effect with each new addition to that line becoming potentially relevant fodder in the interpreting of the next event yet to come.

For a budding journalist hoping to report on the flow of this constantly-growing line, at which point on that line can you reasonably be expected to start?

Do you start examining things solely as they happen? Surely not, this would dilute context from your writing. Okay, so do you then spend months scouring the annals of a subject and, in doing so, build your contextual repertoire? That doesn’t work either, because in all the time you’re spending in the past, you’re missing things happening in the present.

Finding the right onboarding point is a true conundrum and an existential barrier to entry for any initiate current events documentarian.

**The Prime Time is now.**

I may have found a helpful answer to this strange existential crisis in an online seminar this week with RTÉ’s Prime Time and Drive Time host Sarah McInerney.

To add a little context (see what I mean?!), Sarah is an Irish journalist of considerable calibre. She’s known for her uncompromising interviews and tough lines of questioning, often pointed very directly at some of Ireland’s highest-ranking political figures. She worked her way from print journalism to arguably one of the most coveted seats in Irish journalism, that of Prime Time host.

For many who are engaged with the news in Ireland, the above will be fairly self-evident. But what I also learned about Sarah at this seminar is that she’s very open and honest about how she broke into her field. Reassuringly open and honest.

Over the course of the hour-long seminar Q&A session, Sarah touched quite frequently on a lot of the things I’ve mentioned above: the fear of engaging with a new topic; imposter syndrome and how to get over it; where to onboard yourself when it comes to just how much there is to know about any given topic.

While her advice was invaluable (and I’ll get back to that advice presently), one of the most heartening things in her entire talk was hearing that she, Sarah McInerney, one of Ireland’s most respected news figures, felt the exact same way as I did at the start of her career.

She, too, felt overwhelmed when faced with catching up on the annals of history and how vital an understanding of that is to creating quality news copy. Not just as a student, but as an early practitioner too.

So what was her advice? What did one of Ireland’s top news hounds have to say on the topic of onboarding onto history? Just start wherever. That might sound arbitrary, but time is arbitrary if you analyse it long enough.

Sarah recommended what you would expect anyone, even outside of her field, to recommend. Listen to news podcasts and headline rundowns, read when possible, watch the news. Allow news media to integrate itself into your daily routine. In short, develop the habit of passive news absorption.

Simple really, isn’t it? If you want to lose weight, adopt exercise and healthy eating into your lifestyle where you can. If you want to build a wider current events repertoire, build it passively into your everyday routine. The context will come as a by-product.

Finding your onboarding point: imposter syndrome & giving yourself permission.

One thing that I believe stops many people from starting their onboarding process (and I myself am no exception) is imposter syndrome. The nagging voice saying ‘Who says you can do this? What do you know about news? What do you know about history and context?’

We can’t write off imposter syndrome. It’s real and it’s a common blocker in making a start in many of the things people would like to make a start in. We constantly ask ourselves whether we’re allowed to be in the room or if it’s our place and turn to speak. The key tool in renegotiating your relationship with imposter syndrome, and the exact thing Sarah McInerney was talking about in a roundabout way, is permission.

We must give ourselves permission to onboard onto history in order to become effective journalists – or effective writers, historians, doctors, etc. In order to give ourselves that permission, we must start by realising that a specific entry point (like time or the relationship between the quality of a Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson film and its box office revenue) is arbitrary.

Once we internalise that it’s okay to start now and build a knowledge base as we go, entering the conversation becomes a lot easier – provided we put the groundwork into actually building that knowledge. After all, you don’t enter a swimming pool without dipping your toe in first. Followed by your leg. Followed by the rest of your body.