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surprised by the amount of response, shivering? i'm not. for whatever reason, journalists love talking about themselves! umm ... including me, so here's my input:
you can get over the shyness. when i started out at my first reporting job, i was afraid of using the phone. sounds stupid, but i hated calling people and would drive 20 minutes to talk to someone face to face. i think it had to do with having a whole newsroom of people listening in on my conversation and thinking they would think i was dumb. i got over that in about a month, and i'm a stronger person because of it.
as an introvert, what i couldn't deal with is how angry people got over the stupidest shit -- i'm just talking the stories i covered, not errors. even at a small newspaper i got hate mail on a regular basis. people hate newspapers and they hate journalists. if you can't find a way to deal with that, you're right, they will "tear you to shreds."
i took a job as a copy editor to get away from it, and now i'm more of a mid-level editor. copy editing is better because you don't have to deal with angry readers, but it's boring and the hours are horseshitty.
one final thing i do have to say, is that more and more i feel like the j-school i went to misrepresented the profession to me. i was looking over my old class notes and old clips from college. everything was fun and interesting! we got to investigate deep, meaningful stories. writing for the college paper, i got to write funny entertainment reviews -- and all on my own time. even at internships, it was a very protected environment. it's amazing how, in five years, i am now so far away from that lively, enterprising spirit of journalism.
keep that in mind, shivering, because when you get out of j-school, you're not going to be "investigating" much or having time to spend on stories. you're going to be pooping out four to five stories a day about county fairs and small-town politics and interviewing cranky WWII vets.
