I’m a 26-year-old writer and graphic designer working for a small manufacturing non-profit in the States. Though I live in Cleveland, Ohio, I was brought up in the south and subjected to a second-rate education with little basis in fact or effectiveness. There wasn’t much to satisfy my writing urges, and this, paired with a desire to draw up album reviews and let people know I listened to Brian Eno, led me to pursue a journalism degree.
But by the time I got there, newspapers were already regarded as relics, and professors weren’t betting on choice students becoming the next Woodward and Bernstein. The state of the industry was a constant water-cooler topic in the public radio office I worked in, and everything felt flat and ambivalent when it came to what would happen next.
Then Cablegate happened. Specifically, a cache of over 400,000 US cables, war logs, and other confidential documents regarding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were released by WikiLeaks in 2010, who had turned them over to the New York Times, the Guardian, and other outlets for publication. I had read the Guardian plenty before then (mainly arts and culture pieces), but since I’m American, it was never as much of a cultural cornerstone as NYT. However, as the paper began publishing more on WikiLeaks, I found myself opened to an entirely new world of coverage, thanks to Nick Davies and a masterful feature on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In an old paper for my law, policy and ethics course, I referred (pretentiously) to the leaks and corresponding coverage as “the Pentagon Papers of my generation”.
I can’t say the same for Assange, but my fondness for the Guardian has only grown since then. The last few years have seen me falling in love with pieces by Owen Jones, Abi Wilkinson, and Rafael Behr, spanning topics from millennials to Boris Johnson to anti-semitism. Most recently, the paper’s Brexit coverage – and the impending doom that comes with it – has been provocatively excellent, and I continually find new voices and reasons to keep reading. Though, I guess I could do with more Frankie Boyle, but couldn’t we all?
• If you would like to be interviewed in this space, send a brief note to good.to.meet.you@theguardian.com
