Krystal Mess - The embarrassing—and painfully familiar—story of an overeager young journalist. By Alex Heard
Krystal MessThe embarrassing—and painfully familiar—story of an overeager young journalist.
By Alex Heard
Posted Friday, April 29, 2005, at 8:44 AM PT
In case you've missed the big media flap concerning a young woman named Krystal Grow, here's a review. Grow is a 21-year-old college journalism student and newspaper intern based in North Adams, Mass. Last Friday she wrote an article for the North Adams Transcript detailing her failed attempt to get a summer internship at Spin, the music magazine. She came off as green, honest, pesky, and perhaps a trifle pouty about losing. She admitted to being so confident about getting the job that she'd started looking for an apartment in the East Village. When she was rejected, she wrote, she "cried until I passed out, then woke up and cried some more."
The media hubbub started when Jim Romenesko linked to the article on his widely read journalism Web site. Before long, Grow was Topic A on his Letters page, where she inspired a hurricane of ridicule, fury, preaching, sympathy, and multidirectional bloviation from older journalists that hasn't stopped yet. Grow was alternately torn apart for being young, naive, entitled, and bratty, and defended for being young, airheaded, and pitiable. For you non-journalists out there who are baffled by why journalists seem to care so much about this episode, here are two bits of perspective: 1) Krystal is best thought of as an Everykid who represents the bumpy ride awaiting youth on the way up; and 2) No, in fact, the reporters who haunt Romenesko's Letters page don't have anything better to do.
I noticed a couple of things about this discussion. One was that, with an exception or two, none of the reporters theorizing about Grow tried to call her. The other was a theme in the letters: We all make mistakes when we're young, so lighten up. On this score, a woman named Pam Robinson referred to cringe-inducing things from her own past that "I will never write about."
Krystal Mess - The embarrassing—and painfully familiar—story of an overeager young journalist. By Alex Heard: "Posted Friday, April 29, 2005, at 8:44 AM PT"
posted by Dave @ 12:41 AM
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