Opinion | Realizing I belong in the newsroom

I’ve often thought about what it would be like to solely work from home. In my once rose-colored perspective on the idea, I thought of working from home as the dream that many had but few achieved. What is better than being in the comfort of your living room? Getting to switch on a podcast without having to put headphones in? Having complete access to your refrigerator?

All of this sounded really wonderful to me until working from home became my reality, as it did countless others due to the spreading COVID-19 virus.

Up until the second week of March, my last semester of college was going as planned. I was finishing my undergraduate thesis, I was the Editor-in-Chief of my university’s independent newspaper, I was interning for NBC-LA’s investigative reporting team. Everything was on track.

Now I’m still finishing my thesis, I’m still the Editor-in-Chief, and I still work for NBC-LA. But everything really seemed to come to a grinding halt, and now suddenly, I exclusively work from home. And collectively, it has made me realize how much my heart feels at home in a newsroom.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work in some of L.A.’s finest newsroom, from The Hollywood Reporter to L.A. Magazine to NBC-LA – these newsroom are each iconic in their own specific way. They all have been the homes of award winning journalists who have changed the laws, lives and the way we get our daily information. But of course, with each newsroom came a familiarity, and by the time I got to L.A. Magazine, I knew how newsrooms typically operated. Come working for NBC-LA, I felt like a seasoned pro. And yet all the time later, I hadn’t truly realized how much the newsroom itself impacts me and my work.

I deemed myself an extroverted introvert years ago – I’m the person who is a natural leader, who can be loud and confrontational, but needs their alone time more than anything. But being forced indoors due to the ever growing nature of this virus has made me slow down (for the first time in four years) and truly take stock of what I hold close, what makes me the journalist I am and what contributes to my work ethic. And I found the answer: it’s the newsroom.

If you’ve never been in a newsroom and get the chance to visit one, I highly recommend you do. There’s nothing like it. There is a buzz, a fantastic energy that radiates off of the bustling people. In all the newsrooms I’ve worked in, there’s always one very vocal person who yells out the news at it comes in to the assignment desk, there are the designated people who walk to and from the coffee machine on the hour and there are the people you rarely see because they’re out in the field. A newsroom is by far one of the most dynamic work places; I miss it, and I hope I get to return soon.

I will gladly remain at home for as long is needed for our health officials to get this virus under control. Their work is truly heroic and we would all be far worse off without them. But I cannot wait to get back to NBC-LA and to my college newsroom, the latter of which I’m wrapping up in just a few short months. I hope that everyone takes a moment during this uncertain time to realize where in the world it is that they find themselves most at home: there’s really no other feeling like it.