Awards

Last night, I rode with colleagues to the SPJ awards dinner at a fancy place downtown. With the time change, it gets dark around here by 5 p.m. and we left the office more like 5:45 p.m. Our driver used the Ways app, a crowd-sourced guide to how to avoid the worst traffic, which in modern San Francisco, is like choosing a slightly less toxic poison over another.

As a result, we wove through the streets like a snake, slivering this way and that. It took a very long time to get to the venue.

Once there, I thought about how it used to be, a quarter century ago, when I knew virtually everyone in the room. Nowadays, I recognize almost no one. In my pre-day fantasy, I had expected many people to come up and greet me, since I rarely venture out to these events, and am, after all, someone who has been acive in the local journalism community for 44 years now.

Exactly one person came up to speak to me. Few others knew who I am.

On the other hand, I did not work the room. I felt tired after the day at work, and just sat at our table (Table #1). Journalists love to network at these events, so there was a lot of partying before the main event got under way.

Once it did, our team won an abundance of awards. Almost everyone on my team went up to the podium to accept an award. We took home a ton of hardware.

As the ceremony came to an end, I caught a cab home -- the first time I have taken a taxi in years.

Back home, I thought about all of the awards I won as a journalist, a couple dozen. And I thought about why those of us who endure this work do it, what we are looking to accomplish. And I thought a lot about injustice, unfairness, and empathy.

As I watched my staffers collect their awards, I realized what I love about all of them the most. They are a stubborn, hard-working, egoistic group, trust me. But they all share one characteristic -- empathy.

As they tell their stories, they never portray the people in them as "other" -- they always try to find a way to make them seem like you and me. Which is one form of truth.

If journalism matters, and I hope it does, it is to do work like this. To help us all find our common humanity with each other.

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