Pepperdine Graphic Media Adviser Elizabeth Smith (far left) found freedom through words. By sharing her story, Smith explores how she found revival through redemption, the transformative power of hope and how it can inspire others to find purpose, embrace change and strive for a brighter future.
When I think of work, I think of words.
I have been writing all kinds of words as a journalist since I entered fourth grade and started my school newspaper, The Golden Avenue Gazette in Lemon Grove, Calif. My first story was on the school spelling bee, in which I was a competitor — a clear conflict of interest and clear indication of my early love for telling stories about the world around me.
Fortunately, my abilities and my journalism ethics have developed immensely since 1989.
My professional journalism career has spanned the country, starting at the Newport Daily News in Newport, R.I., and landed me here in Los Angeles, where I worked as a digital and broadcast producer for KTLA News. I have had the opportunity to help cover some of the biggest stories around the globe.
But it’s the stories from the students at Pepperdine Graphic Media that have meant the most to me.
I have been a journalism professor and faculty adviser to the Graphic for more than two decades. In my role, I help teach students how to do journalism, but I also get to watch them transform into journalists.
It happens every semester. Students make their way up the CCB stairs and into the Graphic newsroom.
These folks are not always sure why they come or what they want to do, but they are usually drawn to the idea of the work and to the community of a newsroom. Somehow “I like sports,” or “I think I want to be a photographer” usually blossoms into “I am a journalist.”
The transformation from student into student journalist brings important lessons along the way.
These students cover wildfires, rainstorms, road closures and university rankings. But they also cover the spiritual lives of students, student government, new clubs, artists in the community, new restaurant openings and local farms.
They also cover a lot more. Students all across the first floor of the CCB are covering the legal proceedings against Fraser Michael Bohm, the upcoming midterm elections and Malibu’s coastal erosion. I get to be a witness to all of it.
In this world of college journalism, newsrooms are where fundamentals become work, theory becomes experience and learning becomes identity.
Pepperdine is a university hub for Solutions Journalism. This is a reporting approach used in professional and student newsrooms that encourages reporters to look at societal problems and then to look around and see how those problems are being addressed. Solutions Journalism is often called “hope with teeth,” because it operates under the premise that when the news tells stories of what is working, community members may “see better options, and build agency and hope.”
In the fall of 2020, I sat in a Zoom with members of the Graphic staff to interview new staff members for the spring semester. We had just completed an entire semester working in a remote newsroom with 125 staff members covering our Pepperdine community from nearly every time zone.
We covered COVID-19 policies, breaking news, the Presidential Election, racial protests — all from Zoom screens across the country. Facing another semester connecting through our screens exclusively felt exhausting.
In one of our final applicant interviews that fall semester, I asked a young woman who found her way to the Graphic with no prior journalism experience why she wanted to join. “To test my capacity for optimism,” she said without hesitation.
Just like that, she summed up why anyone would ever take on the work of journalism. When the interview ended, I scrawled her response on the whiteboard above my desk and it has remained there ever since. She was new, but she already got it.
Journalism is an act of freedom. Journalism is an act of bravery. But ultimately, journalism is an act of hope — hope in each other and hope for our communities.
When I think of student journalists, I think of hope.
This story was copy edited by Lila Rendel.
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Contact Elizabeth Smith via email: elizabeth.smith@pepperdine.edu