Jaimee Fletcher is a local reporter for the Orange Country Register:
Why is it that you do what you do?
I think with journalism, a lot of people can argue now that it’s lost its source of function, you know? Kind of that watchdog role, that’s my favorite part of it. There’s a lot of different types of journalism that we can go into. Another aspect that I like of it is the storytelling part. We decide what people are going to know, and we decide what is important for people to know. When I meet someone who really inspires me to tell their story, sometimes it can kind of change or inspire other people. So I think those are my two main reasons for doing journalism, if that makes sense.
Why do you think that what you do matters?
Journalists cover a strange role. We’re kinda like lawyers, a lot of people hate us until they meet us. They are really rough, and if you’re a journalist, you’ll have all kinds of nasty things coming at you. But we’re an important source of information. And everything has changed with the Internet and blogs and that kind of stuff, but ultimately, if we don’t write it, people don’t know it. If people don’t report it, it doesn’t get out. That Watchdog role, to me that’s the most important role of journalism; without journalists prying into corruption or ethical issues a lot of things would go unnoticed.
How does what you do connect to larger trends in 21st century journalism?
Right now the trend is really different compared to when I started five years ago. I used to come in and wait for the paper, so we would have three days to put a story together, and now sometimes we have three minutes to put a story together. It’s usually online first, you might read the same story four or five times before that finished product and four of five versions of that story might be up on the website before it’s in the paper. So it is a really different world now.
What is your sense of God’s Place in the world?
I grew up Catholic; I am Catholic, I believe in God, I believe in Jesus. So, for me, I think God is in everything, he’s in the good, he’s in the bad. When bad things happen, that is his way of teaching us. I’m also a firm believer that he has a path chosen for every person, and he gives us little signs along the way to tell us what he wants us to do.
How does your faith play into your job? How is your faith an issue?
That’s the hard thing, because you can’t use it. You have to totally detach yourself from your personal life. Like, I have very strong political views and very strong religious views, and I write things against those views all the time. And those are the stories I am the most careful with, because I don’t want it to come across in my writing as if I’m favoring Catholicism or favoring a political party. Because as a journalist, our number one priority right up there with being accurate is being fair and being objective. For the story, we’re not supposed to add our own beliefs, and that is hard sometimes.
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