Proud of this job? You bet your life | Editor’s notes

The good folks over at Chico State’s Oshler Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) invited me over to be a guest speaker at one of their classes again last week. As always, I accepted. The OLLI groups are fantastic in terms of a) being devout readers of our newspaper and b) coming up with great questions about what we do, and how we do it.

I always enjoy the interaction, and I can always count on getting at least one question I’ve never heard before. And boy, did they deliver this time.

Toward the end of the 90-minute discussion, after fielding some of the typical questions like “Is it hard to find people who still want to do this job?” (no) and “Do you ever look back at a story and think you could have done a better job?” (yes), a woman raised her hand and asked me a question that smacked me right upside the head:

“Would you be willing to die for this job?”

I haven’t gone back and watched the video, but I’m pretty sure my jaw dropped down to about chest-level. After avoiding the urge to deliver the first thought in my head — “Heck, I feel like I die a little almost every day” — I gave it a deep thought and answered it the best I could.

I believe my answer was along the lines of: “Obviously, nobody wants to die on this or any job, and I always tell my staff ‘safety first.’ But it’s not uncommon to end up in a dangerous situation, and nobody gets into this business unless they’re passionate about it.”

Then I delivered a couple of examples. I could think of dozens, but I shared these two.

In September 2020, Carin Dorghalli, a very talented reporter/photographer for us, was having trouble sleeping. She’d been covering the Bear Fire near the Berry Creek area. Worried about what was going on, she drove up there in the early morning hours and discovered her father’s convenience store — which was also the only gas station in town and the community gathering point — had burned to the ground.

In extremely dangerous and harrowing conditions, and devastated by the loss of the family’s business, she went to work anyway. She captured some incredible photographs and went on to write a story that got a first-place award in the state’s Better Newspapers Contest that year.

She risked her life to tell that story. Such is her passion for what she does.

I’m still shaking my head in awe at the other story I shared, and here it is.

Molly Myers, who graduated from Chico State on Thursday night, has been part-time reporter for us since the beginning of the year. Like all of the journalists we get from The Orion (Chico State’s award-winning student newspaper), she immediately infused our staff with additional enthusiasm and passion, delivering one great idea after another.

So, imagine my surprise when she informed me she wanted to take a leave of absence this summer for an intern opportunity — with The Jerusalem Post.

Yes. The Jerusalem Post, the one right there in Israel. I don’t have to tell you about what’s going on in that part of the world, but are stories to tell, and that’s what journalists do — danger be damned.

I’m continually amazed that we still have such a steady stream of young people so passionate about the profession and determined to do the job. In a world where Facebook memes get accepted as fact by people too lazy to do their own research, and partisan hacks from both sides of the aisle can find a news source that will tell them only what they want to hear while writing off the rest as “bias,” I shudder to think where we’d be as a society without people who are still committed to getting it right and being fair.