Even If You Love Writing, Journalism May Not Be For You

I love writing, but I hated being a journalist.

Nicole Kenney
4 min readMar 4

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Photo by Valery Tenevoy on Unsplash

Upon entering my final year of undergrad, my major required me to do at least one internship before I could receive my degree. After looking through a few on my own that didn’t pique my interest, I discovered one through my school writing for the local newspaper.

I thought this was perfect for me and my advisor admitted me after reading through my Medium profile. After all, I already wrote stories as a hobby, and this way I could do it for credits.

Unfortunately, this internship wasn’t as glamorous as I had hoped. I have now vetoed a career I initially considered pursuing post-grad.

That being said, these are the reasons working in journalism wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as writing online (for me, personally).

I hate cold-calling (and repeatedly calling) people.

By far, my least favorite part of journalism was cold-calling people to get information. Mostly because the people I would be talking to had much bigger priorities.

Since I was an intern, most of the stories I wrote were about updates from the local town’s city halls and departments. Since I was working in the middle of a New England winter, a few of my stories were about snowstorms.

And let me tell you, a city’s traffic and highway departments have way more important things to do 24 hours before a huge blizzard than talk to a college kid about their 600-word story. It’s even worse when you realize you’re missing a few details and have to call back with more questions.

While it is part of the job that I’m sure professionals get used to, I felt like I was often inconveniencing and even annoying people with repeated cold calls.

I didn’t like the lack of freedom.

The reason I started writing on Medium was that I liked the flexibility of being able to write about whatever I wanted. I have an interest in several different topics so it is nice to constantly change up what I create.

However, this wasn’t so much the case with journalism.

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Nicole Kenney

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