On April 1st 2009, two professional journalists, Amber Hunt and Lauren Podell, spoke to current and former students of Ms. Wallis’ Journalism class about their field of work.
Amber Hunt is a crime reporter for the Detroit Free Press and spoke to the students about print journalism and online journalism in specific, such as newspapers and news websites. She told the class about her first job in the journalism field, working as a sports correspondent and how she started her own magazine in college, “The Proper Gander.” She has worked as an associate arts and entertainment editor and other various reporting areas, but has always gone back to crime reporting, particularly for what she explained as the “ripple effect,” or how when reporting crime, you see and feel how it affects an extraordinary number of people in many different ways.
Hunt has also won an award in New Baltimore for crime reporting and appeared on Dateline on February 29, 2008 for the Tara Grant murder and again on April 17th of this year. She is currently under contract for a true crime book about a murder that she reported on.
When speaking about how she approaches people when reporting, she stated that “[You] don’t learn everything you need to learn in a classroom,” implying that people skills are a must in any journalistic field, and that even reporters are still human.
Lauren Podell, on the other hand, is a traffic reporter who appears on Channel 4 News, WDIV. She spoke to students about television journalism and the pros and cons of that field. Specifically, she mentioned how hard it is to start in television news and what the hours are like.
Podell graduated from Oakland University where she worked four years on a local radio station on campus, WXOV. Two years into that, she was a TV show host for a local, on campus network, which was her first experience in front of a teleprompter. She got into her current job through a “fake traffic report” contest, in which she was selected from a pool of 350 competitors. As of now, she has worked at that job for just over a year. Podell explained that while working in the industry, “the highs are very high, and the lows are very low,” and “[you] have to love the job, [it’s] not about money.”
Overall, the Journalism students were very grateful that the two came and spoke to them, as the Journalism industry is complex and changing all the time.