I was one of the lucky ones. I always knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I wanted to be a writer. Or a spy. Or maybe both. But I knew I wanted to write. It was when I was 12 years old that I discovered journalism as a potential career path, and I never looked back.
When I was in college, I realized I could combine my love of sports with my love of writing, and I became a sports reporter for nearly 10 years of my professional career.
It wasn’t until about 2 1/2 years ago I was named managing editor here at Tallapoosa Publishers Inc. and once again, my career path shifted. But one thing has always remained constant: My love of pure community journalism.
Whether it be standing on the sidelines when I finally got to witness my first team state championship when Coosa’s boys basketball team won a few years back or digging into the intricacies of a city council meeting and making it digestible for readers, it’s a passion that I don’t think will ever die.
I actually tried to take some time off from journalism. After COVID-19 hit and sports weren’t going on, I was a little lost in my journalism career. As I poured myself into our COVID coverage, I wasn’t ready to take the plunge into purely news coverage and things fizzled out.
I went into marketing for two years — I call those the dark years — and I quickly realized it wasn’t for me. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t regret my decisions; I needed the time away from journalism to reinvigorate myself and I learned skills I never thought I’d know.
But as with every good love affair, it’s never really over.
No matter what’s been going on in my life, there’s always been one constant, and that’s my work. I have cried through heartbreaks and relationship failures; I have battled addiction and grieved through the death of close friends and family members.
But journalism has always been there for me. The one thing I’ve always been good at. The one constant that’s always remained.
As many of you know, I struggle with depression and anxiety and I’m not always super kind to myself. But the newspaper business — that’s my thing. It’ll always be my thing, and it’ll always be there for me to lean on.
I won’t say every day is easy, and I hate that phrase, “If you love your job, you won’t work a day in your life,” because you can quite easily do both. I often shudder under the weight of the work we do every day, and I regularly battle back responses to angry comments about how awful our paper is or how it should be free or how we didn’t know every detail of everything that ever happened.
But what I will say is every day is worth it because we are fighting an important battle, and we’re doing it for our communities.
Lizi Arbogast Gwin is the managing editor of Tallapoosa Publishers Inc. She can be reached at 434-962-9420 or via email at lizi.gwin@alexcityoutlook.com.
