Archive

A hello to you, readers

July 15, 2019   ·   0 Comments

By Paula Brown

My Hello to you, Orangeville

I want to take this moment to quickly introduce myself to you. My name is Paula Brown and I’m a third-year Humber College Bachelor of Journalism student. I’ll be interning at the Citizen throughout this summer, so I wanted to give you more information about myself and how I got here to attribute to the name you’ll be seeing in your local paper. 

I have called Orangeville my home for my entire life, in fact when I first went off to post-secondary it was the first time I had lived anywhere but my childhood home. 

As much as Orangeville has been a part of who I have become, I like to think that the news has played a part in it too.

Growing up my home always got our local newspapers, and had what felt like a consistent run of 24-hour news which would last until the six o’clock news started – now it doesn’t seem so much a shock that I ended up in journalism.

I’ve always been a big reader and that slowly fed into a love of writing, but I never thought that a career in it would be feasible for myself.  I spent the majority of my high school time unsure and confused about what I wanted to do post high school, so I took an array of classes I was interested in rather than ones that would take me into university for a career. Psychology classes, guitar classes, and outdoor gym classes…the one turned out to basically be a survival class, and now I causally know how to start a fire with one match and a pile of birch bark.  

In my final year of high school I decided I wanted to go to school for sports business, since I was a baseball fan having played it in town for the majority of my life. Take something you like, add it to an “adult career” and you’ve got the perfect match for your life long career, right? Wrong, at least for me. 

Now I’ve always struggled with math, it didn’t come naturally to me that way that writing ever had. This should have probably been my first hint that maybe business wasn’t for me, but I was 19 and ready to make a $20,000 leap of faith.

Like many kids who grow up in smaller towns, I wanted to get far away from the place that had known me for the last 18 years of my life. Yes, I know it’s a cliché and it does pain me to write this, but nonetheless I went 377 km to Sudbury, Ont. 

It didn’t take me long to realize that business wasn’t necessarily the job for me (re: my struggle with math) but I chose to stick out the rest of my first year in Sudbury despite my increasing homesickness. After taking a communications course, I started to think about the prospect of working in the communications aspect of sports and so I began a search into how I could do this and where I’d needed to go. 

In early 2016 I decided to begin applying for media programs at schools closer to home. One of these schools was Humber College for their Bachelor of Journalism program. 

So one weekend in the middle of the winter I packed a bag, took the four-hour-long Ontario Northland bus ride from Sudbury to Barrie, a trek that I had done multiple times in my few months there. By this time I was so grossly homesick that I was making that four-hour bus ride and hour car ride to Orangeville every other weekend just to be home for one night. 

I can remember the first time that I walked into the news room, where the majority of journalism classes are held at Humber College, and knowing exactly that it was the place that I wanted to be. 

An array of T.V’s surrounded the room with each playing a different news channel. Cameras, audio equipment, a green screen, teleprompter – all of it a media student’s dream. 

Flashing forward three years now and I’ve had amazing opportunities in my short but dense journalism career and this is just the next one. 

As I said at the beginning I’ll be interning at the Citizen for the remainder of the summer, and I’m excited to be part of the team that writes your local news. 


Readers Comments (0)





Please note: Comment moderation is enabled and may delay your comment. There is no need to resubmit your comment.