WJI 2019, Day 7 PM

Today was nothing short of brutal.

The assignment seemed simple. Armed with a camera and a notepad, we were to go downtown to find and tell a story in 15 photographs.

We thought we could breeze through it. We were wrong.

Tonight, our slump-shouldered trudging back to the dorms serves as a testament—not just to the task’s grueling nature, but to the unforgiving reality of life as a journalist in the 21st century.

In six short hours, many of us encountered the beasts of reporting: sources who hang up halfway through your sentence, sources who call back to accuse you of lying, sources who refuse to say anything at all; corrupted files, dead batteries, bad audio; interviews that are too long, interviews that are too short, interviews in which we asked the wrong questions; deadlines, deadlines, and more deadlines.

With better foresight, better questions or better time management, we can avoid some of these obstacles in the future.

At the end of the day, though, our fellow citizens often hinder our noble cause to unshackle truth. There's little we can do to change this. After all, George Orwell defines journalism as "printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations."

And so, many fear us. Many hate us. Some want reporters dead—and sometimes injustice wins, and such wishes come true.

No, none of us here at WJI 2019 have received death threats or hate mail. Not yet, anyway. In fact, many people in Sioux Center have been incredibly gracious and welcoming toward those telling their stories.

But we have personally glimpsed the world where people dislike our vocation—what will most likely be a career-long adversary. It summons a question: is the pursuit of truth worth the trouble? We might all be using what few, frazzled brain cells we have left to ask ourselves just that.

Perhaps, after today, some of us aren’t quite sure anymore.

Perhaps some of us have already reached a conclusion: it’s not.

But perhaps some of us are thinking back to the Dordt University auditorium, where we proudly displayed our feats of photojournalism to each other and have decided, yes, the life of the journalist is hard—all the cups of sub-par, lukewarm coffee in the world couldn’t make that easier to swallow—but in the end, the reward of our storytelling outweigh its challenges, and the truth is worth it all.