I wasn’t sure what to expect the first day of the job as a breaking news editor. I was mostly thankful to even have one. My wife and I had been eking out an existence for almost a year on the money we’d got from the wedding, contract editing and translating jobs, and all sorts of other odds and ends. A regular job with a regular salary and regular hours felt like a godsend.
I’d arranged with the boss that I would start after the Jewish holidays, after all the craziness of eating and family and disrupted schedules that come with them.
At the time, the main thing I worried about was what news there was to cover or talk about. The fight over reform of the legal system seemed to have been put on the back burner. Few things were happening domestically, otherwise. Above all, the security situation seemed calm.
Then the holidays ended.
To call what happened afterward a frantic, terrifying mess would be an understatement.
Public transportation stopped working. I couldn’t even get to the office to do all the proper paperwork and meet the acquaintance of my colleagues, and had to do everything online and via WhatsApp. It took a real effort just for my wife and I to get back home from my relatives.
There was no time to settle down, though.
I’ve been in this country for about thirty years and I never remember feeling this panicked, this overwhelmed with emotions, except perhaps during the height of the Second Intifada when buses seemed to be blowing up everywhere.
The big story was in the south, of course, where bodies were piling up, the body count was hitting numbers I never thought possible, and atrocity stories turned out to often not just be true, but worse than originally reported.
When you’re an average citizen, you can turn off the news, try to tune it out, even when the worst is happening.
When you’re in the news business, you have to look. You have to read. You have to hear. Even if you’re in a cushy office or working from home, the “field” of field reporting comes back to haunt you, to terrorize you, to hound you.
You are the field.
And boy, did I feel it. I learned of horrors and experienced feelings I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Maybe the worst thing about it all was having to tell my wife that the horror stories were true or even worse than she knew. Would have loved it all to be exaggeration.
My wife and I felt it on a personal level, too. Those first few weeks, there was no real sense of a border, of a clear line between us and Hamas. Everyone in our usually “safe” city was stocking up on goods, and we were personally discussing where the safest place to hunker down for a few days would be. We even prepared emergency grab bags in case we needed to get out of Dodge, and fast.
Between that and the fear and reality of rocket fire, and my first few weeks on the job were a baptism of fire in hell – on a war zone, from a war zone, and reading about the kind of stuff that happens in the worst of war zones.
I was a brand new reporter/editor and I had just gone through something only veterans speak of. I didn’t know what to make of it, and in some ways – I still don’t.
All I knew was that this new job stability was going to come with some real instability, too.
I was in for a wild ride.
The Newbie Editor is a column with occasional musings on the inner workings, craziness, and problems of being an editor and the news media more generally, by me, a newly minted breaking news editor.