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Spring 2005 Commencement Speaker, Jackie Spinner
Outline of Jackie Spinner's Career by Dean Pendakur
Jackie Spinner is a staff writer for the Washington Post, where she has been a reporter since 1995. She started at the Post as a summer intern on the Financial staff after earning her master's degree at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. She has a bachelor of science degree in journalism from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. At the Post, Spinner has worked as a Metro reporter and Financial reporter. Before going to Iraq, she covered accounting policy for two years and was the newspaper's expert on, in her own words "weather hedges and obscure financial instruments." She went to Iraq as a war correspondent and survived mortar attacks, car bombs, the battle for Fallujah and a kidnapping attempt outside of Abu Ghraib prison. She has contributed to MSNBC, PBS, CNN, BBC, ABC, and National Public Radio and was featured in a PBS Frontline documentary on reporting the war in Iraq. Before the Post, Spinner contributed to the Oakland Tribune, the San Diego Union Tribune, the Decatur Herald and Review and the Los Angeles Times TV magazine. Her proudest moment was when the Daily Egyptian at Southern Illinois University beat the Daily Illini of the University of Illinois in the state college newspaper competition. It was 1992. She stood on her editor in chief's desk and asked her reporters to shout for one minute as loud as they could for all the people who doubted that they could be the best. Spinner is an award-winning journalist and travel writer, whose exploits from the Galapagos Islands, Rock of Gibraltar, Spain, Finland and Jordan have been detailed in the travel pages of the Washington Post. She is a member of the Journalism and Women's Symposium and was a media fellow at Duke University in 2002. Spinner grew up in Illinois. Her proud parents were a pipe fitter and a schoolteacher. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Pictured Left to Right: Provost and Vice Chancellor John Dunn, President James Walker, Alumni Achievement Award winner and Commencement Speaker Jackie Spinner, School of Journalism Director Walter Jaehnig, Professor and Dean Manjunath Pendakur
Introduction of Jackie Spinner by Dr. Walter Jaehnig
I am honored to present our Commencement speaker, Jackie Spinner. Dean Pendakur has outlined her career; I would like to introduce this remarkable young woman from the perspective of someone who knew her while she was a student in the School of Journalism.
A former colleague said of Jackie this week: "We always knew she was going somewhere special," and that is true. And how did we know that?
--We knew from the initiative and enthusiasm she showed at the Daily Egyptian, our outstanding campus community newspaper. As a freshman she showed up two weeks early, expecting to play a trumpet in the Saluki Marching Band; instead, she grabbed a spot in the newsroom, and seemingly never left the newsroom until graduation.
At the DE she is remembered not only as strong editor and the many awards the newspaper won under her leadership, but for starting the DE's first investigative reporting team. One of the team's first projects was an investigation of overcrowding at Carbondale bars--a journalistic success that cost us thousands of dollars in advertising when unhappy bar owners pulled out of the paper!
--We knew it as faculty when we saw her intelligence and curiosity about the world outside. Not only was she an A student in the School of Journalism, but she was named SIUC's Lincoln Laureate-as the outstanding undergraduate student on the campus-an honor accorded her twin sister, Jenny, at another Illinois university that same year.
--We knew it in the SIUC journalism community, when we recognized her endless energy and enthusiasm that made the university a better place. Among her many activities, she organized a weekend seminar, coincidentally enough, on war reporting, headed the Society of Professional Journalists during its most active era, and played a major role in organizing the Daily Egyptian's 75th anniversary party.
Initiative. Determination. Intelligence. Curiosity. Energy. Enthusiasm. These attributes are what we remember of Jackie Spinner, and they stand as life lessons for our new graduates on this important day as to what they themselves can achieve. To me, these attributes describe Jackie's love of life itself.
To illustrate this, please let me read three brief quotations from her work:
From a travel article on Finland, January 2005:
"Here is the thing about Finland. It is so easy to lose yourself here. To be numb with cold and to feel more alive than you ever have. In a quiet field of snow, in an unexpected blizzard, life gets suspended like the sunset. You wrap yourself in the frosty blue light and you stare out into the unknown with time to think whatever random thoughts enter your head. You have no plan, and you no longer feel as if you need one, in Finland."
From an electronic postcard to friends about her new job at the Washington Post, 1997:
"Sometimes the pressure of working for a major newspaper gets to me. But those are the time when I look ahead and think about next summer, the possibilities I cannot even imagine: Maybe one day they'll let me go overseas. Maybe one day I'll be an editor. Maybe. But in the meantime, I'm having a really great time. You can pinch me now."
From an e-mail sent in November 2004 from Baghdad:
"I feel a deep commitment to be here, to record history, to watch history, to challenge history. I have an obligation as a journalist to be here". Someone has to watch and write and record and tell people in the United States and the world what is really happening here."
We are pleased that she is home safely from Iraq and could join us in celebrating this special day.
Please welcome Jackie Spinner.
Commencement address to the 2005 Graduating Class
College of Mass Communication & Media Arts
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois
May 14, 2005
FIRST, thank you Dr. Jaehnig and Dean Pendakur for your kind words---and to all of you for honoring me today with the Alumni of the Year award. I am humbled to be standing here in your presence and am grateful for the recognition. No one gets anywhere alone. I am here because of all of the teachers in my life, including my mother and godmother with whom I am honored to share this moment today. I am here because of the loving support of my twin sister, my brother, my late father and a clan of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, colleagues and yes, even editors.
To the Class of 2005, congratulations. Do not ever forget this day. Reach back to it years from now, no matter where you go, no matter where life takes you. This is a day for you to celebrate with your friends and families not only your accomplishments so far but also the start of your journey.
--Call for Moment of silence for journalists being held hostage in Iraq or who have been killed covering the conflict, including Washington Post translator, Luma.
Thirteen years ago, I left this great university for the world, with everything I owned crammed into the back of my Chevy Nova hatchback. I headed West to California, not certain of my exact path, only certain that I wanted to be a journalist. I never expected that path to lead me to the Washington Post or to Iraq, where I have spent much of the past year in one of the most difficult, dangerous and hostile environments the press has ever known. I volunteered to go to Iraq, eager to take part in recording history, in recording one of the most significant stories of a generation. The editors were taking a chance sending me. I had no foreign reporting experience. I had only left the country for the first time four years ago. I certainly had never been in a war zone.
During my time in Iraq, I survived a kidnapping attempt outside of Abu Ghraib prison when two men grabbed me as I was leaving and tried to drag me into a taxi. They ripped at my clothes and saw that I was wearing a flak jacket. CIA, CIA, they shouted at me in English. No, Washington Post, Washington Post, I shouted back. The Marines, who had been watching me leave the prison from a tower, saw what was happening and came running out, firing bullets and scattering the crowd. I shook when I got back inside the prison. When we get back to the office, I told my translator, who had found me as the Marines were rescuing me, you tell them I didn’t cry. As the months unfolded, I had brushes with car bombs and mortars. I covered the battle for Fallujah, the largest military operation in Iraq since the war began. I baked cookies in my hotel late at night to stay awake while waiting for foreign contractors to be beheaded, literally killing time waiting for someone else to die. I was convinced that if I sent the fledgling Iraqi police guarding the hotel baked goods on a regular basis then, when the insurgents came, they’d line us up and I’d hear them say, “Let the little one go. She made us cookies.”
For the first six months in Iraq, I lived in a high-rise hotel across from the “Green Zone.” There is a great myth that journalists live in this protected compound, sharing it with U.S. government officials and contractors. In fact, most of the hundreds of foreign journalists still in Iraq live in what we call the Red Zone, which is all of Iraq outside this protected zone. I never once slept in my hotel bed, which was next to a balcony door and a potentially deadly spray of glass. Instead, every night I curled up between two cement pillars still dressed in the clothes I had worn that day.
I spent time with U.S. soldiers at military checkpoints like the one outside the Baghdad airport, where Army troops mistakenly killed an Italian intelligence operative in March. At one checkpoint in November of last year, I waited with troops to try to catch a suicide bomber. The soldiers told me the only way to catch one was to wait for him to try to blow us up. Fortunately, no one tried.
I reported on car bombs and power plant reconstruction, wrote stories about soldiers in battle, soldiers waiting for battle, soldiers dying in battle. I interviewed hundreds of Iraqis, sometimes without ever leaving my hotel. I met them instead through the scribbled notes of our Iraqi staff. When they came back from an assignment too dangerous for me to cover myself, we sat together in front of my computer, while I grilled them about what they saw. What color were his eyes? Did he really say that? How did he say that? What do you mean he looked anxious? Tell me how he looked. Was he sweating? What were his hands doing while he talked? I owe everything to these brave Iraq men and women who act as my eyes and ears in reporting the story of Iraq to our Washington Post readers. They are the real heroes. Without them, we could not do our jobs.
The greatest challenge about being a reporter in Baghdad was not being able to report for myself. If we want to travel outside of Baghdad, we do it with the U.S. military. People who go out alone risk being kidnapped. It was not safe for me to identify myself as a foreigner or for our Iraqi staff to be seen with a foreigner. We did not linger anywhere in public. If I wanted to talk to someone on the street, I sent one of our Iraqi staff members to do the interviews or I ducked into a shop for a few minutes and then ducked back out, not wanting to stay long enough to be identified.
I stopped carrying my American passport when I left the bureau, and learned how to lose my American ways, the smallest things that might betray me as a foreigner. They were little things. My staff advised me to:
Wear lots of lipstick. Iraqi women may hide their hair, but they love flashy lips painted in bright reds and oranges.
I traded in my silver jewelry for gold because Iraqis wear gold.
They bought me a purse my grandmother would love and I hung it on the crook of my arm just like she would.
And upon the advice of my staff, I stopped smiling when I went into public. After all, Iraqis are suffering.
I disappeared into my Iraqi identity, even adopting an Iraqi name that the translators could use to summon me when we were outside. Our biggest fear was coming across an illegal insurgent checkpoint. If they found out I was an American, I’d most likely be kidnapped, and my Iraqi traveling companions would be shot on the spot. It had happened to other foreigners.
Like my father in Vietnam, I had never felt more abandoned by the America that claimed my passport. I was constantly beat up by readers who sent e-mails accusing me of being for or against the war, for or against the occupation, depending on their own agenda. People made assumptions about me because of my name, my news organization, where I went to school, other stories I had written. It was hard not to take it personally, given the tremendous danger we were in. I started to question why I was there, if the American public didn’t believe anything I was telling them anyway.
This will be your battle, too, whether you go to Iraq or to Louisville, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, New York City or Herrin, Ill. Our ratings, as communicators, are at their lowest levels in history. People don’t believe in us anymore, they don’t believe us, and that is largely our fault. Many journalists have abandoned the pursuit of objectivity, simply chucked this ideal out the window. Journalists have causes now, agendas. They want to advocate. The only thing you should be advocating is the truth. Even when the truth is difficult to get at, even if it means standing up to your editors, even if it means getting passed by or passed over. The American media are in the position they are in with the public because we care more about being first and about scoops than we do about being right. Get it right. That is something I learned right here at SIU during my days at the Daily Egyptian. It is something I carried all the way with me to the Washington Post.
You keep yourself honest by staying on your path. You will be your own best competition. Sometimes I look around my own newsroom, a place filled with graduates of the Ivy League, a place with people whose fathers were ambassadors, people who grew up among the American Elite. I am proud of my struggle. Every day that I walk into the Washington Post newsroom, I am grateful to be there. When you get where you are going, don’t forget to look back. In my own rearview mirror, I can see a road littered with rejection letters, letters that I have saved all of these years. I keep them in a trunk and occasionally take them out to look at them, to remind myself that I am still that kid from Illinois with humble Midwestern roots who got her start at place called the Daily Egyptian. These letters, I’m ready to let go of them now. So I’m going to give them to you. Keep them as a reminder. Bring one out on occasion, and ask yourself, well, if Jackie Spinner could do it, WHY can’t I? Why NOT ME?
So see you later ...
Louisville Courier News
Huntsville Alabama Times
Springfield State Journal Register
Baltimore Sun
Corpus Christi Caller Times
Decatur Herald and Review, my hometown newspaper
The Gannett Newspaper Chain, the entire chain
Chicago Sun-Times, twice
Houston Chronicle
Orlando Sentinel
San Francisco Examiner
St. Petersburg Times
Colorado Springs Gazette
I am sure you already have received plenty of career advice, maybe even read a few books about how to get started in whatever field you have chosen. There is plenty of this advice for sale, in books, through seminars and on-line courses. If you don’t have a job lined up, you’re probably going to spend the next few months obsessing about it, worrying about it. Perhaps you have an internship at a small newspaper, and you’re trying to figure out, how do I get to the top? How long will it take? What can I do to land the big one?
If you remember nothing else from what I’ve told you today, if years from now you don’t even remember my name, remember this:
There is only one way to get where you want to go. And it is really quite simple:
Start walking.
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