Rosanna Xia is an environment reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She covers the coast, rising sea level, public rights to nature, and endangered marine species. She also emphasized accessibility via her lens as a colored reporter. Rosanna was majoring in Quantitative Economics at Tufts University but opted to become a reporter after graduation. Her background in economics unexpectedly helped her career.
Xiangyuan Chi: What do you think that young journalists need to master to succeed in the world of journalism today?
Rosanna Xia: For print journalism, the fundamentals don’t change. I think you need to have a good grasp of sourcing and knowing how to find story ideas. I think it is really important to be able to come up with a story and conceptualize the story on your own to be able to pitch well. The skills involved in that process are like general curiosity and being able to notice details of things.
Chi:I think I have this kind of problem. Sometimes I just don’t know what to write.
Xia:Yeah, that is why the source development is really important. You have to know the newsmakers—those that always tell you when the protest is about to happen, or a big community meeting is about to happen. Find people who are kind of your keys into the community or the world that you are covering.
I think another important point is data. That’s what learning economics really helped me because understanding costs and benefits, tradeoffs, being able to frame, present, and explain the numbers in a way that is tangible and accessible to the general readers is really important.
Another one is the strong command of grammar. If you are going into print journalism, we are no longer in the era that we have a copy edit desk that catches everything. It is really on the reporters nowadays to have a strong command of the language, grammar, style, and the organization of what you are working for.
Chi:Beyond what you’ve talked about, are there any particular challenges for ethnic minorities to succeed in competitive newsrooms like the L.A. Times?
Xia:I think it’s challenging to separate yourself beyond your race, culture, heritage, and your language abilities. The diversity in the newsroom is not the black reporters covering black communities or Latino reporters covering Latino communities. The community I go to for coastal commissions all tends to be predominantly white, and older. Having a reporter of color covering the coast is different from having a white reporter doing so. So, my articles on the coast tend to expand to issues of access, which meets the concerns of readers from different races. That’s why it is crucial to have diverse reporters in the newsroom covering different worlds. And these novel angles of reporting often make colored reporters stand out in the newsroom.
Xiangyuan Chi 