ABSTRACT
This chapter offers Michele Mitchell's encouragement and wisdom about the path to being a reporter, a broadcaster, an editor or a media professional. Mitchell wanted to be the Great American Novelist, even before she heard that cliche. She wrote her first short story at five, her first novel at 10, quickly followed by a series of novels about the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, May the Fairy and Moana. Journalists are always swashbuckling around the world, wiping desert sand from camera lenses, crouching in shelled hotel rooms, and generally committing truth to paper. Mitchell have now done both: write novels that were actually published, and practice journalism in print, television and film. She has never starved in an attic, and neither have she shaken sand from a camera. But she has realized that, at its essence, there is not much difference between the mediums in motivation for telling a story.
