Let the right ones in, let the wrong ones go

This is (half of) a little speech my mentor gave after a my first, tumultuous year in Hong Kong, to her cohort of trainee journalists.  I'm posting it here but for the sake of tidiness, it might get moved to Gulyas. 
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...Another favourite New Yorker Cartoon: Two dogs are sauntering down the street. One dog says to another, ‘You know, the trouble with Obedience School is that you learn all those things you never use in the real world.’
When you compare much of what I’ve tried to teach you about journalism ideals with much of what is going on around us, it would be easy to think that what you’ve learnt with me isn’t what you’re ever going to use in the real world. But I’d like to remind you that the Cadet programme wasn’t created to keep the South China Morning Post muddling along just as it has for more than 100 years. The Cadet program was created to … improve journalism here, and wherever you eventually work. So the quote I’d like you to keep close to your heart is not one from the New Yorker’s unruly dogs, but from Robert F. Kennedy, a U.S. attorney general and senator. He was the brother of President John F. Kennedy. He’d done a number of morally questionable things early in his career but, I think, got in touch with his better angels after his brother’s assasination and was, I think, on a path toward doing great things for the downtrodden when he was killed during his 1968 presidential campaign. He said;
‘There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask, why not?’
And that’s my challenge to you as you move into the next stage of your career: Dream of how things that never were but could be - in this news organisation, in this world, and push to make those dreams come true.I need to warn you that your career will not be linear. I went back yesterday to make sure that linear was precisely the word I was looking for. And yes it does mean ‘progressing from one stage to another in a single series of steps’. Wherever you’re going, there’s no direct route. And you probably will never reach where you now think you want to go. But you’ll very likely end up somewhere much more interesting and challenging.
I’ve warned some of you not to leap to conclusions based on a simple example. But I think perhaps I’ve a few things to teach you based on one example I know best, my own career. You got the G-rated version on your first day. Reality was grittier, scarier, uglier, and ultimately more rewarding. I started watching Walter Cronkite with the CBS Evening News when I was about 10, and have wanted to be a journalist ever since. I was on my junior high newspaper. I was editor of my senior high newspaper. I was editor-in-chief of my college newspaper - a daily with a circulation of 12,000. In college I interviewed former Secretary of State Dean Rusk about a war in the Mideast. He was so impressed with my story that he sent me a glowing note, which helped me win a national writing championship, and that was my ticket into an even bigger writing contest, which I also won. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude with general honours and honours in political science, a sky-high grade point average. I went on to work for the Atlanta Journal as a cops and courts and local government reporter in a windowless, one-woman bureau in a red-neck county. I was told to write news stories and not worry about features. I had no idea how to do my job; my editor was a completely unhelpful idiot. My six-month review blasted me for focusing on news stories instead of features. I was transferred to a different county. I did a bit better but had no clue how to navigate inside an organisation when I was never even in the newsroom. Less than a year after having graduated as the superstar of my journalism school, I was fired. And I was devastated. 
I’d always loved history, government, politics, so I moved to Washington D.C., and got a job with a tiny nonprofit news service and was assigned to cover the congressional delegation of Pennsylvania. I knew nothing about the state, I struggled. I wrote really well but I was shy and had very little idea about how to create a news beat, how to get sources. The bureau was run by three guys in their early 20s who were clueless about how to manage anyone. I was miserable and making peanuts, so I doubled my salary by moving to the dark side and becoming a press secretary for a semi-famous member of Congress. I’d done my homework, I thought. He had what seemed like a decent voting record. He was the chairman of a powerful subcommittee. But he was stark, raving nuts. He would demand to have a simple press release announcing a community meeting rewritten 12 or 13 times - I actually used to keep track - until the event supposedly being announced had already passed. And then he’d be furious no one had showed up. Staffers - people many years my senior - would hide in the restroom, because if he couldn’t find you he’d pick on someone else instead. That lasted forever - which was actually about six months. I quit, writing a letter telling him he was a jerk. I was offered a better job and better salary. I declined. 
I founded Murdoch News Service. I covered the congressional delegation from Georgia, a state I actually did know. I found several small and middle-sized papers eager to have their Congressman’s Washington activities reported on for the first time. I held lawmakers accountable; I probably cost one of them a re-election. I learned to write interesting news stories and features with a bit of flare. I found a knack for developing sources. I was interviewed for an article in a journalism review about why I’d decided to strike out on my own. I said I was tired of working for people I didn’t respect. And for three years it was a good job - my first good job. But then I did a weekend stint as a copy editor at The Washington Post. And then I got a Post paycheck - two day’s pay was far more than I was making in a month.
So I became a Washington Post copy editor, eventually landing a full time job on the National Desk, the most prestigious one, and running the copy desk two days a week. But when I started it, it was run by a brilliant martinet. He flogged us, and scolded, and lectured. He’d let you cool your heels for hours and then load you down with so much copy that if a pal hadn’t secretly edited half of it you’d have been crushed. I hated him. We all hated him. Eventually the other copy editors and I ganged up and got him fired. And now I know that I’ve never learned as much from anyone as I did from Bob Williams. I never write or edit a sentence without having Bob look over my shoulder. ‘Worst accident? Worst? The worst accident was the single-car smashup that killed my sister in 1973. If you mean the collision had the highest death toll, then say that. Be clear. Avoid superlatives without attribution. And the lesson is, yes, be careful with your word choice. I hope you already know that. The bigger lesson I think is don’t be 100 per cent confident of your 20-something year old judgment. A few decades from now you will look back and see some things differently. Try to remain as open to the idea that you might just be wrong now and then. 
I was closeted at the Washington Post… My being gay was simply nobody’s business, I thought. And then gay men started dying of AIDS and the editors in charge of the POst were so squeamish that they refused to write stories clearly explaining to readers how to avoid AIDS. They couldn’t grasp that any of their readers might be gay. They couldn’t grasp that any of their staff might be gay. I complained in a very closeted way about our coverage. I would push them to say exactly what they meant by ‘exchange of bodily fluids’. But they wouldn’t. I was asked to write a little report about how we could improve. 110 pages later I had educated myself about the world of gay issues. And I had come out. The report changed nothing. Except me. I went on to be a Post assignment editor and a Post reporter, but being honest about being gay was considered being ‘political, being an activist’ - a Post career killer - though I was not an activist of any sort.
When I got the opportunity to leave the Post, where the atmosphere was poisonous and where everyone felt unappreciated, I jumped at the chance. My report had not just changed me but it had also changed my partner, who became the first and only nationally syndicated gay-issues columnist. We wrote a book about how her column had come about and how it had changed  newsrooms, lives and families. And that book was successful enough to make a first-rate New York publisher give us a nice advance for a second, much more challenging book - a 50 year history of how the U.S. Supreme Court had dealt with gay cases. Groundbreaking. Important. Amazingly difficult. After years and years of knowing a little about a huge number of things but not a tremendous amount about anything, I briefly became the most knowledgeable person on the planet about one small topic. Exhilarating to be an expert. Washington Post review: If someday the U.S. Supreme Court recognise gay Americans as equal citizens and you want to know how we reached that point, come back and read this book.’ Most important work I’ve ever done. It mattered. It is lasting. It cannot be replicated. The lessons here: Let your work change you if it can. And, more importantly, do work that matters to you. Find a way. It won’t be your entire career, but make sure you create room in your life for the stories or books or radio shows that truly matter to you.
I discovered a hidden talent for public speaking. I was returned to the paycheck world as a managing editor of National Journal and gradually discovered that I’d grown into someone who managed reporters quite well - not just their words but their talents. I was able to help several well known Washington reporters do the best work of their careers. Ten years later, Deb and I moved to Boston for back to back fellowships at Harvard and MIT. I wormed my way into the Harvard teaching job and discovered that I was damned good at it. From there it was on to Hong Kong Baptist for a strange year, and then I made my way here.
And the unpredictable ups and downs will continue. I think I’m pretty tough, and more than a bit cynical. But the world is still capable of breaking my heart. And the world is still capable of making me proud of being a journalist, of being an American, of being gay, of being your mentor and friend.
So be strong but stay soft enough that the world can still break your heart. And then let your friends - your fellow superheros- help stitch it back up.
You’ve chosen a crazy, challenging, unpredictable career. I have tremendous faith in each of you. Don’t let fear choose your path.
Joyce Murdoch
June 12, 2015