To: Just another city council member

Subject: Potential Interview (if you’re ok with it…)

“Good afternoon! I’m a student reporter at Chapman University covering local public affairs. If I could take just a few minutes of your time, I’d like to chat with you about a few upcoming agenda items! I’ve left my contact information below. Thank you! I look forward to hearing from you! 

Best, 

Megan.”

While this isn’t an exact transcript, it’s hauntingly reminiscent of an email (or two or three) that I sent in my early days as a journalist. I can remember the tedium of drafting. For every 10 letters I inched forward, a quick fire spam of the delete button would take me 20 spaces back.

How many exclamation points is too much? How many follow-up emails should I send when they don’t respond? If they agree to speak with me, how much of their time should I take up? 

I don’t want to be annoying or bothersome. I want to be approachable, but professional. I don’t want to be too loud, or too forceful, or too assertive or too bold. I want — no, I need — my peers and contacts in my field to like me.

Women often overly edit their language in the workplace to appear “nice” and “polite,” fitting the image society presents as the perfect, demure women. The field of journalism is no different: I want to be taken seriously.

But where do I begin to hone assertiveness as a journalist when I’ve hardly been able to own it as a woman?

I’ve spent my entire life being talked over. Men have told me my voice is too soft. 

“Speak up.”

 I mumble. 

“Speak clearly.” 

I say “like” and “um” too often. 

“Speak smartly.”

If they stopped speaking, just for a moment, maybe they might hear me.

Perhaps that is why I became a writer. Words have no gender; you can’t tell them to smile, or say they only got on the page because they batted their eyes. They don’t have to be polite. In journalism, the words just need to be accurate.

For more than one class, I’ve been required to screen and discuss “All the President’s Men,” a 1975 film about how reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein investigated and broke the infamous Watergate scandal with The Washington Post.

The film shows how rigorous the life of a journalist can be. Several scenes depict Woodward and Bernstein cutting through their sources’ misdirection, meeting with their secret contact in a dimly lit parking garage and knocking on strangers’ doors to gather information.

Watching the film as a journalist invigorates me. Watching the film as a woman, though, terrifies me. Nevermind my reservations about being polite and interrupting people when they speak.

Clandestine meetings in a parking garage? Walking alone at night seeking out strangers? As a woman, I’ve tailored my entire personality to avoid enraging people and putting myself in dangerous situations, and yet sometimes it feels that’s what being a journalist is all about.

These fears aren’t baseless, either. Numerous journalists during their careers have reported being threatened by angry men in their DMs, simply for the fact that they happen to be women. It doesn’t matter how true or accurate her story is; the mere act of her speaking is enough to cause disruption in society. 

It’s as if being a woman has automatically branded these journalists as “having an agenda.”

I recognize that I do have privileges that protect me. My whiteness, and the fact that I largely report on Orange County affairs, which are very different from covering international politics or dangerous situations. Many women who have been killed, or have had to be relocated due to death threats, are women of color or women who report on war and violent conflicts.

Sometimes it’s downright frustrating. Debilitating, even. Not only is an inherently risky field being exacerbated by the preexisting danger of being a woman, but I have to work twice as hard, because learning to be a good journalist means unlearning everything society has taught me about being a “good woman.”

For all of my life, I’ve been schooled to be polite and modest; to ask permission and apologize quickly; to self-doubt, to self-censor and to never challenge those above me.

To this day, I catch myself screening each email to a source several times. I’ll cut a few exclamation points. I’ll change wording that panders too much to the politician’s ego. I’ll add a few stronger statements to enforce that yes, I do have a deadline.

That’s not to say I can’t be meek and unassuming. To be honest, I’m still not sure how much of my quietness is a product of my own personality or what I was taught as a little girl. 

Besides, the mark of a good journalist is learning to listen more than you talk. If people misunderstand my silence or underestimate my comprehension, that’s not my fault.

And if being a journalist makes me a rude and outspoken woman, so be it.

I’ve been called worse.