My First Byline: Cary Aspinwall
Staff writer, The Marshall Project
What is your current job?
I'm a staff writer at The Marshall Project. I work mostly on long-term investigations, and a lot of my stories focus on the impact of the criminal-legal system on women and their kids.
What was your first byline?
I mean, technically my first bylines were in my high school newspaper, and then our town paper and my college paper. Those were fun but not my most meaningful ones. I think my most meaningful bylines were probably some of my first investigations I did on my own or with colleagues at the Tulsa World, when I moved back to news after writing features for a number of years. One of the first big investigative projects I got to work on there was about women in prison, and obviously the topic stuck.
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What was your first real job in journalism?
My first real job in journalism was working as a reporter in the community section of the Tulsa World, covering West Tulsa and Sapulpa. It was great work experience but I was eager to get to the downtown newsroom and work on "hard news" stories, which took me about four months. But some of the people I met in my first year at that paper are still some of my best friends in the world.
How did you get it?
I had interned at the Tulsa World while in college at Oklahoma State University and worked very hard during my internship, one of the editors very sweetly said to me during my last week: "I bet I will see your byline in the New York Times some day!" I had no such expectations, I had never even been to New York.
I graduated at a weird time in the industry, papers were still making money — but the internet was looming and they were unprepared to pivot. There were a lot of people holding on tight to their jobs, and mostly grunt work for young reporters. I only got three job offers right after college — one was to be a police reporter in Durango, Colo., for $10 an hour; I got a half-baked offer from the Houston Chronicle to write articles for their community sections as a freelancer, and a full-time job offer with health insurance from the Tulsa World, in the community section. This was before you could remain on your parents' health insurance after college, so I took the gig at the World. And I still could barely make rent. My car kept breaking down and I couldn't afford most of the repairs.
After a few months, I got promoted to an open spot covering the night cops shift and started working in the main newsroom. But newer reporters still had to work shifts on the obit desk as well — literally answering the phone and taking information from funeral homes for the daily death notices. And what worries me now is that there are even fewer of those entry-level gigs, because there are so many fewer newspapers.
What advice do you have for people looking to break into journalism?
I feel like no one wants to hear this but: Do the work that no one else is willing to do. Every lucky break I caught came because I offered to do something no one else would, or took an assignment someone else had passed on, or couldn't figure out how to get it done. Every time I take a call when I don't have to, or show up in person when someone else might have just phoned, the universe hands me an even better story. I have so many examples of this...
You asked about my first byline, and I can't remember what my exact first byline would have been at the Community World, but I remember in my first month, I was writing a feature story about a local pastor who had started putting out chairs and coffee on Saturday mornings for families visiting their loved ones at the Creek County jail — it was small and overcrowded then and had no visiting room. I had already talked to the pastor on the phone, I could have just written a nice little story about his misbegotten youth and belief in second chances. But instead I got up early on a Saturday morning (and I was hourly, not salaried) and went and sat with the pastor and talked to a bunch of families outside the jail. It just so happened that one woman there to visit her son that morning was the daughter of an older woman who had just been brutally killed by her live-in boyfriend a week earlier, and there was still a statewide manhunt looking for the killer. No one had been able to get in touch with the victim's family yet. And here I was in a jail parking lot with her. I got her number, went out to visit and talk about her mother and the ongoing manhunt, and got the story that helped get the job I wanted. Just show up. Do the work. Look for a story that someone else missed.