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Relocating a Journalist

May 30, 2007 By Brad Linder Leave a Comment

A little over a week ago my wife and I packed up and moved from Princeton, NJ to Brooklyn NY. It wasn’t a long journey, but sometimes it feels like we moved a world away.

The first year we lived in Princeton I continued to work full time at WHYY in Philadelphia. Even after I struck out on my own as a freelancer, my head was still in Philadelphia. Having spent more than six years reporting on Philadelphia, South Jersey and Southeastern Pennsylvania, that’s what I know.

I’m familiar with local politics, politicians, and political issues. I know the environmental issues and the geography. While I spent a bit more time covering New Jersey than I had in the past, I still associated myself with the Philadelphia region.

Last week I deleted my local news blogs and feeds from Google Reader and started to replace them with New York feeds. I’m already working on a couple of stories based in New York or New Jersey, and the beauty of writing for Download Squad and TV Squad is that I can do it from anywhere I can get an internet connection.

Making the transition is a bit daunting. I’m not going to get to know New York the way I did Philadelphia overnight. In fact, I’ll probably never know it with the same intimacy. Not only is it a much larger city with its own set of issues to understand, but I don’t expect to report on daily breaking news. There’s a great local public radio station to handle that, and there are far more freelancers in New York than Philadelphia. My role will be to find stories that a thousand other people aren’t already working on, and that’s pretty exciting.

But the strangest moment so far came for me the other day when I was in the laundromat. I looked up at the TV and saw a local newscast. At first I was just struck by the fact that every story dealt with a local crime wave, a car that had smashed into a building, or a fire. Sure, this is the stuff of local news everywhere, but somehow I’d gotten used to it on Philly stations, and didn’t notice it that much. I usually only perked up my ears in Philadelphia when a story I was interested in came on, and tuned out the rest.

But here, I don’t know enough about local issues for keywords to pop out at me. So I kind of half payed attention to the whole newscast while trying to read a book. And the thing that struck me most was that I didn’t recognize any of the reporters. Sure, most people are used to seeing familiar faces on the evening news. But I’m used to seeing people I know. Literally. I’ve met pretty much every local reporter in Philadelphia, and whether I know them well personally or now, I’m used to recognizing most of the faces on local news.

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About me

Brad Linder is editor of mobile tech blog Liliputing.com, host of the LPX Show podcast, and an independent journalist whose work has appeared on public radio and the web.

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