Advice from My News Friends

August always feels like standing on a diving board; not at the end, necessarily, more like the top of the ladder. You can’t really remember the climb. It’s higher than you thought. There’s a vague idea of what’s coming, but you can’t actually see what you’re getting yourself into. Climbing down really isn’t an option. I mean, you’re up there already; and so you make your way forward, ever forward: maybe running, maybe carefully creeping to the edge. Either way, the end result comes down to gravity, the natural pull to whatever comes next: sink or swim.

This year, the usual seasonal shift of late summer comes with a new but familiar wrinkle. For the first time in 30 years, I’m going back to school. For the first time in my life, it will be as a full-time teacher.

Nerves and excitement exist, or so I’ve heard, on roughly the same wavelength. I’ve read it helps to reframe nervous feelings this way, welcoming any butterflies to the party instead of wasting a bunch of time and energy trying to evict them from your stomach. It’s a good thought and I know if I was talking to students, I’d tell them something like: “Embrace the uncertainty of being a beginner! Trust yourself!” But I have to admit, like most advice, it is far easier to dish out than it is to take it.

These last few weeks before the semester starts are about really digging into the admin of being a new teacher and getting a handle on the specifics of the courses I am responsible for teaching, but I have thought about my role and my future students pretty much every day since December, when I first heard about the job.

In preparation for the upcoming semester, I reached out to my various group chats of longtime news friends. Considering these chats are usually filled with memes and ridiculous stories, I prefaced the text with a warning to brace themselves for a legitimately earnest request: could they please share their favorite practical advice or best practices for students interested in pursuing careers in journalism, particularly t.v. news?

Knowing my audience, I added, “something besides: ‘don’t do it.’”

After the initial jokes, the responses started to come in and as they did, I copied and pasted each one into a document titled: “Advice from News Friends.” Looking at the document now, there are plenty of things very specific to the relatively small world of local t.v. news, but I realized my news friends also have plenty of wisdom that stretches far beyond that world.

I thought I’d share some of what they had to say with you.

1.) “Asking for help/clarification/feedback is not weakness. It’s smart and it helps you grow.”

2.) “LISTEN! People miss so much because they’re so focused on their next question. Don’t talk over the end of someone’s answer. Give it a beat. It’s when you hear the best stuff.”

3.) “I think taking pride in the community you are serving is very important. It makes you better at storytelling [aka your job.]”

4.) “You’ll always tell a better story when you remember to be a good human first.”

The people in these group chats are former colleagues who became friends who became family throughout my career. I respect them immensely and so does anyone else who knows anything about our field. When you look at it, their greatest takeaways over decades of experience boil down to quite simple things: gentle behaviors, humility, respect for the world around them.

There is a lesson in that to be sure.

Greater still is the reminder that the connections we make in the process of carving out our lives are extremely valuable. Of all the things I could pass along, that might be the most important, but it’s also the kind of thing I know they will have to live to learn. And I guess that’s where I come in, ready to cannonball into the classroom bringing with me my news friends and connections and experiences, intent on creating a learning environment where they can start to weave together their own networks and carve their own paths, perhaps discovering, as my one news friend put it:

“You will do the weirdest job on Earth with the weirdest people alive. And you will love it.”

This essay originally appeared in my column in the July 30, 2026 edition of the Perry Herald in Perry, NY.