For 354 days, Mackenzie Grant was a morning news producer for a TV station. Until the election of 2016. “The results deflated me in a way I wasn’t expecting. A Trump presidency meant fighting for an industry that would never fight for me.”
I have written about Mackenzie Grant before. Her parents are long-time family friends who lived on the same block as we did back when I worked at WESH in Orlando.
My daughter used to babysit Mackenzie.
I was somewhat tickled when Mackenzie decided to work in local TV after college. Plus, I was interested in her perspective as someone just entering into the local TV news business. So I wrote about her when she first graduated to be a digital news producer and then when she switched to be a news producer.
I’m Facebook friends with Mackenzie, and when I saw that she had posted a deeply personal and moving account of her time as a news producer, The Duty We Call Journalism: My Year in News During the 2016 Election, I asked her if I could share it.
Here are the opening paragraphs.
For 354 days, I wanted more than anything to be like my fictional hero, Mackenzie McHale — the protagonist and executive producer on HBO’s Newsroom.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s an Aaron Sorkin creation that tells the story of a news staff who decides to buck ratings and do the news well.
If you take nothing else from the rest of this post, know that these people exist in real life.
These journalists hell-bent on presenting the facts, spend countless hours, making nearly nothing to fulfill the duty we call journalism.
On this day, two years ago, I was one of those people.
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