When I was a kid, I had a game that I used to play for hours and hours. To my parents and siblings, it felt like I wandered around muttering to myself in our Maine front yard, but in fact, I was actually building an elaborate fantasy world in my head.
The drainage ditch beside the road was a river, the cradle of an ancient civilization. An old cover of a well was a city under siege. Then, suddenly, she would run inside and use markers to draw maps of everything she had imagined.
I drew hundreds of these. My favorite books had maps on the 1st page: “The Phantom Tollbooth”, “Swallows and Amazons”, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. I spent car trips in the backseat flipping through our logbook. We were a family of backpackers, and I made our topographical maps.
Like many other journalists, I ended up entering the industry next door. In college, I learned to make maps using software called GIS, and my first job outside of school was in urban planning.
On my 1st day, my boss handed me a stack of data visualization books and told me that I would be responsible for all the graphics for the quarterly reports. Maybe that sounds awful, but the truth is, I liked it a lot more than the urban planning part.
At the same time, I started a personal sports blog and started staying up late making weird maps and graphics. This ended up earning me my 1st job in journalism, on the website deadspin.
During those years at Deadspin, I was a sponge. I learned to refine, to write, to come up with ideas for stories, to be a better designer – my color choices were often horrible. I’ve seen work that vehicles like the The New York Times were doing – like the project”snowfall” – and started teaching myself to program.
Then suddenly I had my 1st hit. I looked at public salary databases and found that the highest-paid employee in most states was the head coach of football or basketball at the largest public university. I put these findings on a map – what else? – and it went viral. I felt like I had really done something and I knew I was going to continue with journalism.
After deadspinI jumped to the FiveThirtyEight and eventually to The Washington Post, where I became an infographics editor. I was still learning, but in recent years I have felt that the joy I received from my work began to fade. The news became emergencies all the time.
I started to have a mantra that if I could get through today, tomorrow would be less intense. It turned into “if you can make it through this week“, later “if you can make it through this month” and finally, “if you can make it through this year”.
When we were immersed in covid-19, I was drained. I started having trouble reading the news. I had to look at the paragraphs several times before I could absorb them, and it became especially difficult to delve into visual stories — the kind of work I edited that got me into journalism in the beginning.
All through 2020, I had just one idea that really broke through that burnout. O Washington Post has a section called KidsPost. I pitched her on a project to compile newspapers kids drew at home during the pandemic and build a cool website for them.
We did that, and the headlines came. “Hard work for juicy berries”, wrote the “The Daily Excitement Worldwide“, in a bright green pencil. “Does your favorite chocolate support slavery?” asked the “MG Tattler“, in a font size usually reserved for the outbreak of world wars.
This project did not go viral. But I loved it, because in these newspapers I relived the joy I felt when I was just a kid running around the backyard. And I recognized the emotion I felt when I was becoming a journalist and learning something new every day.
During my year at Nieman, I looked for people and projects that would allow me to recover that emotion and joy. I learned to build electronics from scratch. I did one weird digital art with the webcam.
I love making stuff, and I’m very lucky because I get to do it for work. But here’s what I understand now: if I make things just for work, I can learn to hate them — and I don’t want that. I need to find the space to continue doing some things just for me.
The text was translated by Victor Schneider. Read the original text in English.
O Power 360 has a partnership with two divisions of Nieman Foundationin Harvard: O Nieman Journalism Lab it’s the Nieman Reports. The agreement consists of translating texts from the Nieman Journalism Lab and Nieman Reports into Portuguese and publishing this material in the Power 360. To access all published translations, click here.
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