My tenure as a Newsday towns reporter is over and the feeling is bittersweet. It has been an almost three-year whirlwind of challenges, happiness and frustration but ultimately it ended in love and appreciation.
I have joined CBS News as a reporter in Manhattan covering economic disparities and other fun business tidbits for the MoneyWatch team. No, I’m not gonna be on TV – at least not all the time. Yes, I’m very excited, but I’m nervous at the same time. It’s a new beat and I’m eager about the challenge of developing this thing.
I’m forever grateful for the lessons I learned while working at Newsday.
Likewise I’m grateful to have met and worked with so many passionate journalists during my tenure. I will really miss the friendships I built there. Everyone on staff helped me become a better reporter and everyone has a special place in my heart. I’ll never forget my colleagues at Newsday. They have a great staff of super talented people in Melville.
Leaving Newsday for CBS News marks the first time in my career that I won’t be working for a print-based newsroom. I suspected, with the way the industry is changing, this might happen at some point so I prepared myself long ago.
It will definitely feel weird coming into work and not grabbing something tangible with my name in it somewhere, but change is good sometimes. I believe I’m going to grow in ways that I don’t even realize now that I’m a digital reporter.
Knowing that my stories will only be published digitally will force me to constantly practice adding visual elements to my pieces so that readers are drawn to my reporting. It will also force me to share my stories on social media more often because I don’t have the benefit of truck drivers home delivering my journalism to someone’s doorstep in the morning. These are practices I should have been doing long ago but my frequency wavered many times, I’ll admit. I’m going to hold myself more accountable for posting my stories and my colleagues’ stories on social media.
CBS MoneyWatch soft-launched in April 2009 then went fully live in June 2009. The name MoneyWatch comes from a business news segment that CBS Evening News aired for many years in the past. We are super selective about what topics we cover and which ones we don’t, which I think is fantastic. The stories I’ve seen from my co-workers have been amazing and inspiring – to say the least.
I’m thrilled to start working for the MoneyWatch editors. They are extremely accomplished journalists who are bright and efficient and I think I can learn a lot from them. My immediate goal is to impress them with my news judgment, commitment to accuracy, precision in writing and ability to adapt to the newsroom culture. My long-term goal is to make them feel as if I’ve been working there for a decade even though I’m only on year one or year two.