My First Byline: Emily Flitter
My First Byline: Emily Flitter
Finance reporter, New York Times
What is your current job?
New York Times finance reporter.
What was your first byline?
The first one that came to my mind was a Boston Globe story, in their "Ideas" section, that I reported and wrote from Egypt, where I was living in the spring of 2005. It was about how the Bush administration was trying to bring about change in places with authoritarian governments by trying to reconfigure elementary school classrooms so young students learned about democracy. I had no idea what I was doing but I got the email address of an editor at the Globe and pitched this story and it turned out well. The headline that they put on it was so clever, it was: "Students for a Democratic Society."
Read the highlights of what more than 200 journalists had to say about how to get a job in the industry in the first year of Your First Byline.
What was your first real job in journalism?
In the summer of 2003, I interned at the San Mateo County Times in the San Francisco Bay Area. I had applied from afar — I was going to college on the East Coast--and had been accepted, or so I thought. The day I arrived in the newsroom the managing editor acted surprised and told me they had meant to hire someone else. But then I was assigned tons of stories, basically whatever the other reporters didn't have the bandwith for. And to my surprise I got paid for every story! I had lots of bylines that summer but I can't remember many of them. I graduated from college the following year and moved to Egypt, where I freelanced as a journalist for a year.
How did you get it?
My internship, as I said, I got a bit by mistake. But what led me to seek it in the first place was the fact that I had been working on my college newspaper, which was a weekly. When I arrived at college as a first-year student, someone told me I could see movies in the theater for free if I reviewed them afterward for the newspaper. That seemed like a great deal to me so every weekend I saw a movie, wrote a review, and turned in my ticket stub along with it to get the cost of the movie ticket back. Some of the most fun I had was when I would see a movie that stank and I could write a funny review panning it. The arts editor at the paper loved those, and she encouraged me to do more for the paper, and that was how I started doing journalism.
What advice do you have for people looking to break into journalism?
Find a passion and write about that passion, whatever it is, whether it's video games, knitting, chamber music, actuarial science or lepidoptery. For a great example of how passion can lead to an amazing career as a writer, read William Finnegan's memoir “Barbarian Days.” He loved surfing, devoted his life to surfing, and is now a New Yorker staff writer! If you like to write, you will write, no matter what else you're doing. The more impassioned you are about a particular thing, the more authority you'll have as a writer. There's a very journalism-specific version of this, which is: If you can't get a fancy newspaper internship or job, go work for a trade publication. Spend a year or two writing about oil and gas markets or grain or metals or some other thing a small but wealthy group of people care about. You'll build great sources and learn how to describe complicated concepts, and your specialized knowledge will make you more valuable to any newsroom.