The burden of journalism.

This year I’ve probably learned more about writing and journalism than during the whole of my college career. For a few months, I went to the nearby college library and read books upon books about the subject, and I became much more literate in a relatively short span of time. Nonetheless, there’s a big difference between knowing about journalism and doing it.

Journalism ethics are pretty straightforward (for the most part) and work well for most areas of your life. Seek the truth, respect others, be accountable…all very relevant and useful concepts, not only for writers, but for the general population as well. Details like libel are murkier. This is where I started, and I think it’s been an excellent vantage point for everything else I’ve done since—it’s much easier to build something if you can survey the area properly first.

But the rest of it is actually quite hands on. Writing mechanics have never come easily to me even though I’m quite aware of good sentence structure, spelling, grammar, etc. And as for article ideas and implementation, sometimes I struggle there too. But perhaps the biggest hurdle has been getting used to being plugged in at all times. The burden of journalism is the constant state of awareness that a reporter requires in order to catch all the details, connect all of the dots, and write the story sooner than the competitors. Deadlines don’t care about your sleep schedule, and there’s not enough time to go back and find all the details you need. There are no days off.

In esports, this awareness extends to tournament results, roster swaps, game features, esports league formats, potential new esports, game design…and the list goes on. If you’re covering more than one esport, there’s not enough hours in the day to actually feed all that information into your brain and process it; you’re tuned in 24/7 and constantly reading articles, watching VoDs, and reading live tweets just to keep up to date. Any time that you lose to sleep or inattention can’t be easily made up for.

It can get very exhausting.

For that reason, it’s good to take a personal day every now and then. If you don’t take breaks or unplug yourself from the mainframe every now and then, it’s really easy for stress to affect your sleep or your health. I don’t know if my brain tires out more easily than others—Pulitzer, for example, was hyper-vigilant and made it a life mission to examine every fine detail closely and add it to his memory bank—but it does sometimes become cumbersome. I’m not great at letting things go and relaxing either, but I’m trying to go outside and do some walking for at least one hour a day and just rest my brain.

The idea of doing journalism doesn’t seem too difficult. Writing news or feature articles doesn’t take a lot of effort, really. But the constant state of awareness and ravenous hunger for information might just eat you up if you’re not prepared for it.