Journalism by Accident

At the tail-end of my first year of college, an acquaintance of mine jogged up to me after a class I slept through almost entirely; he literally grabbed my oversized coattail and swung me around with an urgency that still shocks me.  
“Collin, you’re doing the Tartan next year, right?” 
I squinted at him with tired eyes, puzzled. This is what you wanted to ask me, dude? 
“Yeah I uh. Yeah I am.” The Tartan is our school newspaper; I wondered if his forceful grab was really necessary. 
“Well. I’d rather my daughter be a prostitute than my son be a journalist.” He told me with dead seriousness. 
“Well Samuel, I guess I’d rather be a journalist than a prostitute, because here I am.” 
In fact, lots of my family are journalists through strange happenstance. My mom (Mutti) was a journalist, radio host, and television broadcaster in the Navy. She, once an aspiring designer, was sucked in by the novelty of a recruitment poster that promised world travel and TV airtime. She joined the Navy sans-degree and was soon posted in Italy; she claims that she snuck makeup into boot camp and did everything she could to keep it “fun and light,” words I don’t usually hear associated with boot camp. She met my late Vati (German for father) there; he joined the military and a career in journalism, because his ambitions in life up to then had all evaporated, and the Navy was a chance at a reset. 
They worked on stories and broadcasts together; my mom hated this “handsome jackass” who used his charisma to weasel out of any negative consequences. But in a few years, they were married and in love; Mutti was soon pregnant with twins. She carried her journalism skills with her for the rest of her life; she is still a whiz at video production and can communicate her desires better than most people I know. 
My granddad, Art Hall, also ‘fell’ into the journalism industry, and fifty years later, at age 73, he’s still at it. He started as a distribution worker at a small daily newspaper in New Mexico, his home state. It was a job to pay the bills, along with a candy-vending business. He left the industry for a few years to a bait and tackle business in Louisiana. When those jobs didn’t pay the bills and when my grandma was pregnant with Vati, he went to work at a newspaper in Florence, Alabama.
A couple of years later, he moved his family to Cape May County, where he became the publisher of the Wildwood Leader. From there, he purchased Shout News, where he worked summers non-stop selling ads, laying out the paper, and doing every aspect of a job that usually requires an entire team. He describes those years at Shout as the hardest he has ever endured. 
I have always loved to write, but have never been sure what I want to do with it. I didn’t fall into it like my grandparents and parents, I was born into it. It’s always been there in front of me. I’m trying to write a book about the grotesqueness and beauty of my life in Louisiana, but it’s kicking my tail in harder than anything I’ve ever done. Journalism pays poorly, is thankless, and often resented. The current administration has attacked journalists relentlessly; Trump has gone so far as to call the New York Times an “enemy of the people.” It’s not a job you do for the money, or even for the joy of it. But if people like my grandparents and my parents don’t at least try to cover governmental, environmental, and social issues with depth longer than a social media post, who will? I don’t know how long I’ll be writing for newspapers, or how long they’ll be around for me to write for them. But the world is a better place when fact-scavengers can still earn a paycheck.