My First Byline: Katie Hyson
Reporter, KPBS
What is your current job?
I report on racial justice and social equity for KPBS News, the NPR and PBS station in San Diego, California.
What was your first byline?
My first byline was an accident. I was going back to school in my late 20s for "true storytelling," not realizing the word I was hunting for was journalism. For a class assignment, I produced a story about the first food justice certified farm in the South. The local NPR station asked to publish it. I had never considered that there were people behind "the news," or that I could help create it.
What was your first real job in journalism?
I quit my full-time job in immigration advocacy to take a temporary position they created for me at the local NPR station on their digital production team. I lost a significant amount of pay and all my benefits to take it. But I was thriving.
How did you get it?
I had started doing on-stage storytelling at Guts & Glory GNV (similar to The Moth), and one of the newsroom higher-ups, Gary Green, heard me. They brought me in to help create the pilot episode for a storytelling podcast, and it got me on the newsroom's radar and it on mine. In Gary I had an invaluable supporter. He saw me not for my resume or what I already knew, but for my potential. He saw me as a journalist before I did. He advocated for creating the assistantship for me. He told me I was crazy to leave my job to take it, and I told him he was crazy to offer it to me. He said they could teach me everything I didn't know, and what they couldn't teach me I already had in spades. So I took the leap. Bless that man.
What advice do you have for people looking to break into journalism?
Start doing the kind of work you want to do in your free time. If you want to be a journalist, go out there and do journalism. Don't wait on someone to hire you. Having something to show a potential employer — anything, even if it's self-published — will take you much farther than asking them to invest in you blindly. Look for any opportunity to get your foot in a newsroom door. You can always pivot once you're inside, but there are a lot more entry-level jobs in digital production, for example, than in reporting. Be flexible and humble and hardworking once you're there, and be vocal about what you most want to do. Ask for what you want.