By JACQUELINE LEE
The UNITY News

The days of having a single mentor to guide you throughout your career or trying to get by without one have passed.
Rapidly changing newsrooms mean that young journalists ought to have several numbers on speed dial.
“It might be wise for a person to have a whole coaching staff,” said Joe Grimm, recruiting and development editor at the Detroit Free Press.
That staff might include a mentor within the newsroom who can serve as a go-to person during crunch time, or to help navigate newsroom politics and ethical issues. A mentor outside the newsroom and a mentor for personal issues, career advice or to get a grasp on the business side of things.
Any combination works, Grimm said, and there’s even “reverse mentoring,” where the learning is mutual.
Melissa Patterson, a Chicago Tribune intern who is being mentored by a courts reporter this summer, agrees.
“I really don’t think you could have too many mentors. This profession is way too complicated and way too stressful to do on your own,” she said.
In this era of buyouts and layoffs, however, mentor relationships are often disrupted by an increasingly frequent game of newsroom musical chairs.
“Sometimes it’s hard to be a positive mentor when you’ve lost a part of what made you fall in love with this business,” Patterson said. “So it’s harder to find a mentor, especially if students don’t know where to look.”
Patterson advises others to find mentors outside the newsroom, such as the two college professors she refers to as lifetime mentors.
Greg Morago, a pop culture reporter for The Hartford Courant, never had a traditional mentor, but said he always wished he did. With that in mind, Morago has been a mentor for 12 student projects at minority journalist conventions in the past.
“Sometimes relationships can be forged during a couple of short and intense working days, and it doesn’t have to be a constant every day relationship,” Morago said.
This year, Morago was planning to work as a mentor for the UNITY student projects, but had to cancel his trip two weeks before the convention because he took a buyout from his newsroom.
“A lot of these relationships are being disrupted now, but whether they are broken is up to the individual,” said Grimm, who volunteered to take a buyout at the Detroit Free Press this week. “Technology makes it possible to mentor long-distance.”
Sheila R. Solomon, senior editor for recruitment for the Chicago Tribune, first entered the industry in the 1970s. Back then, she said, colleagues did not welcome her race or her gender in their newsroom, so much as mentor her on how to stay in the business.
As her career progressed, Solomon took younger journalists under her wing, helping them to take those first steps and learn to keep walking.
“I think these mentor relationships will always exist because we’re human, and they exist everywhere else,” she said.

topic: Industry Issues
tags: coaching, intern, internship, Joe Grimm, mentor, personal development, UNITY Convention

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