The LW wants to know:

"You journalists who've read and responded, what motivates you? Is it something like what I describe, playing out some personal psychodrama? Or more like the responder's sense of civic duty and service to readers?"

I suppose it's all of those things for me.

I like to think that my chosen career brings me closer to the noblest ideals of our democracy (which crumbles a little more each day). I like to think that I am seeking out the "capital T" Truth in a world where everyone has an agenda. I like to think journalism is one of the few professions that really depends on participation and mutual trust.

But I also like getting my ego stroked when I see my name in print under the headlines. It's a kick. It's rewarding. I'm an extrovert and I like the constant social interaction. Perhaps that's my psychodrama talking.

My best advice:

Keep reading writers you love. Try to keep that feeling of awe and respect that you get when reading an incredible piece of writing. Perhaps carry around some kind of reminder as to why you wanted to go to J-school in the first place.

I know this helped me when I was freezing in Chicago, standing on a corner until I could bug enough people to get a decent quote. It helped me when I made my first big error in published copy. It helped me when I got hung up on or ignored.

But I'm not a career-changer, like you. I'm just starting out and have lots of room to grow. It's brave of you to take on something so foreign and obviously outside of your comfort zone. I wish you the very best of luck.

Many of us in the public history field are compelled by the same civic-spirited motivation & love of stories as the best of journalists. If you're truly interested in people's stories & how their seemingly ordinary lives fit into the historic context, public history might be a viable alternative. Oral historians (one aspect of public history) interview an extraordinarily wide variety of public & private persons as part of their work--actually "passion" would probably be more precise. This isn't to say that the oral historian does not ask tough questions--these are usually the ones that merit asking! But you're not under the same type of deadline pressure or other conditions which detract from the final product or your relationship with the informant or interviewee as a fellow human being.

Oddly enough in the late 60s/early 1970s, I wanted to be a TV journalist. While some of my friends in junior high sang into their hairbrush "microphones", with hairbrush bristles inches from my lips, I pretended I was Walter Cronkite reading the news from the pastel-colored pages of US News & World Report. Life didn't work out quite the way I'd planned but I can say that as a public historian for these past 30 years, I have been extremely fulfilled & satisfied interviewing the witnesses, victims, survivors, & shapers of history.

introverts should all sit in corners and copy down in scribal fashion what other people say

fuck that fuck you

the truth is newspapers, the print version, are a dying breed. I used to be a journalist, and every month or so, we'd have meetings trying to figure out why circulation was going down, way down.

We figured out that our readership was dying off and young uns' just weren't keen on buying newspapers, much less taking out subscriptions. We'd put in youth oriented stuff, and no one would read it because the target audience wasn't buying no matter what was in it. Those kids today! Anyway, I don't know what kind of journalism you want to get into so here's my advice on learning to ask the tough questions.

Try it for awhile and see if it gets easier. There may always be some questions you feel uncomfortable asking. I remember blanching when my editor wanted me to call back a source and ask how much they made a year. Nice people in my family just didn't talk about money. But as others have pointed out, there are tough parts to any job.

Please don't let being an introvert or being shy stop you. Most of the reporters at my former paper were introverts. Introverts can make good reporters because they actually prefer other people do the talking and know how to listen and not interrupt.

If you do have an anxiety disorder, however, meds might help. You certainly don't have to take them forever.

Good luck.

n my experience as a newspaper writer and editor on small paper level, there aren't many reporters who ask tough questions. On occasion, one turns up, but most the reporters lack that hard-assed quality and get by just reporting the news without confrontation. Sure, it would be great if we had a lot of tough questioners, but they don't pop up very much, especially with beginners who come to small papers.

Your best bet is to get through the that beat reporter time and try to work towards doing more features - and not investigative ones. You can do interesting, important, issue driven features without "askiing the tough questions." Or you might do what I did - move towards the arts. You don't have to ask artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, etc., tough questions, you have to ask them good ones. And they appreciate it when you do. From what has been related to me, there are actually far more people in newspapers asking tough questions than asking good ones and I think that's a very important distinction.

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.