One year ago this week — Sunshine Week — I set out to chronicle journalism in America in 2017 by driving 10,000 miles. As a former full-time journalist turned journalism professor I wanted to step out of my own newsroom experiences and learn. I was interested in holding a mirror up to the journalists who bring us the news every day. “Who,” I asked, “is watching the gatekeepers?” I visited news outlets big and small, for-profit and non-profit, traditional and cutting-edge across all media.
During this project, most days I would drive nine to 13 hours (my Apple watch thought I was dead), conduct interviews, shoot and record photos and video. Then late at night in hotels I would edit video and photos (to use in my journalism classes) and blog about my experiences. I now have hundreds of videos and photos as well as a library of interviews with journalists.
I could not have picked a better time to document journalists bearing witness to history. The month I left for the first leg of my trip March Madness tipped off, Chuck Berry died, Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing began, a federal judge blocked a revised travel ban, Attorney General Jeff Sessions dismissed Obama-era prosecutors, and former President Obama was accused of wiretapping Trump Tower.
And that was just month one.
National news moved faster than I could digest, as I covered journalists while they covered the news. I immersed myself in the study of watching creative people work. Everywhere I went there was major breaking news. In Santa Fe there was a shooting. In New York City there was a blizzard. The summer of 2017 was a summer of wildfires, wherever I was, narrowly escaping two. Fire in Sedona. Fire in Burbank. Fire in Breckinridge. I started to think the world was on fire.
The lessons I learned on my adventure to document American journalism have taken me a year of digesting what I saw — and many notes — to find patterns and overarching truths from my trip. I truly believe this strange…
