Essence

"This is just an era of my career," said Cynthia Gordon, Washington correspondent for Essence Magazine.

And something about the way she said that it was so reassuring - like it's OK to make little forays into new areas - to try something different, and just because you do so doesn't mean that you'll be doing that forever, or that you've somehow committed the rest of your life to this one pursuit - just that you're exploring possibilities.

It's OK to bounce around a little bit, see what you like, and take it from there. It's not always the GOGOGO - pushpushpush never stop - never slow down - never take a breath or make a wrong move ever world that everyone's got us so hyped up about.
Learning's not just for college - it's OK to save a little bit for the next seventy years or so. God forbid we haven't outlined bullet point by bullet point our entire existence by the time we're twenty.

Cynthia is 29 - really young in Washington terms - and she's already interviewed the President of the United States twice. But to end her profile there would be incredibly shallow, and though the risk of that description hasn't deterred me before, I want to highlight the fact that she has really tried out a diversity of journalistic forms.

She actually studied "Creative Non-Fiction" in college (an interesting concept in itself), then worked for Essence in New York; first for the arts & entertainment section, where it was her job to "be out" and just experience the culture of the city, then after some time, for the news portion, where she finally got to write what she loves most - long, "beautiful" narrative pieces about real peoples' struggles.
Ever since since moving to D.C., however, she's mostly written short, quick pieces for the website - a big shift away from her previous work. Nor is the content itself exactly her bread and butter; more politics, profiles and policy and less of the eloquent long-form personal stories that she's really passionate about.

But her optimism and the reassurance that this is just a phase of what's sure to be a long and varied career really helped to take the pressure off all of this life planning that I'm starting to get myself so worked up about.

I also loved how she scoffed at the fact that everyone makes politics seems so complicated, when really, she said, it just boils down to groups of people who want something - not such a foreign concept after all.

Once again, like yesterday's German speaker, I really appreciated her candidness and blunt overview of the highs and lows of her job. Those sorts of analyses are the most helpful.

     -  Press briefings aren't news / it's not the issues that drive the story, it's the people / print journalism   isn't over, but being just a print journalist is / pitch an interview by saying how its beneficial to both of you, and ask hard questions by hiding behind statements like "our readers think..."

Good stuff like that.