What I've Learned: Brandi Grissom

Brandi Grissom is an award-winning journalist who currently works for the Texas Tribune, an online, non-profit news organization. Grissom has also worked for the El Paso Times, the Alliance Times-Herald, the Taylor Daily Press, the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung, the Associated Press and the UT Daily Texan. Before she did all that, Grissom attended ACC from 1999 to 2001 and was the managing editor of the Accent.

I started college late. I graduated from high school in 1996, and I took some time off to work at a newspaper, actually. I worked at my hometown newspaper and lived in a few different cities and did a few different things till I figured out what it was that I really liked and what it was that I wanted to be when I grew up.

(My hometown) was in Alliance, Nebraska. The paper that I worked for was a six-day-a-week afternoon paper. Our paper came out at noon every day which is totally bizarre now. We were excited on the days we got to print in color.

I wanted to start school as soon as possible, but I also was paying for it all on my own. The least expensive route for me was to wait until I got residency in Texas and then get my core classes out of the way at ACC.

I just love working at a newspaper, and so for me, at the time, (working at the Accent) was not just an opportunity to do writing, which I love to do, and some reporting, but to do the editing and put the paper together and see it through from start to finish every time it came out. It was an opportunity to get more experience at what I love doing.

I learned a lot more about editing there because I hadn't done much work with other people's writing before.

It was sometimes frustrating and sometimes really exhilarating to see people's different perspectives and what people think of journalism. Some people approach stories in an entirely different way than I ever would.

I was working at the Accent on 9-11.

I remember sitting there thinking, holy cow, what am I going to do for the Accent? How am I going to report this? How am I going to tell this story? This is the most important story of my lifetime, certainly so far. So I had to figure out a way to tell the story, and the Accent didn't come out for at least a couple more weeks so … I went to campus and started interviewing anybody and everybody that I could find on campus. But there weren't very many people on campus. I don't think we even had classes that day. I just remember there was hardly anybody on campus, and everybody was just in shock. And, I remember talking to a girl who was a student, and she was just sobbing because her brother was in one of the towers. She hadn't heard from him yet, and nobody in her family had heard from him yet.

The town that I grew up in had 8,000 people in it and so for me it was a good transition to go from ACC to UT.

I thought I had a lot of bravado. I felt oh, you know, managing editor of the Accent so… and I've worked at, you know, a real newspaper, so I thought I had my stuff together. And so I walked straight into The Daily Texan office and applied to be managing editor. Which, it turns out, is not that simple at all!

So once I figured out, oh, you actually have to work there for a while and earn your stripes first, I proceeded to go earn my stripes, and I started reporting at The Daily Texan and worked at the copy desk and was a news editor. And even though I felt pretty silly for applying to be managing editor on that first day, I was still determined that that was what I was going to do. So, I did. Eventually I was managing editor, and it was one of the hardest jobs I've had.

It was like herding cats.

What I learned at ACC was a lot about managing my time, learning to really prioritize. Between working at my day job and working at the paper and doing homework, learning how to prioritize is just an important life skill that you need all the way through your careers.

I basically have my dream job which is not something a lot of people can say, and I feel really blessed and fortunate to have that.

I get to tell stories that I think are important, and I have the luxury of having time to dig into those stories, to really learn my subject matter. And I get to work with people who inspire me to be better. I'm always challenged and pressed by my editors and by my colleagues to be better and do better. And I get to learn, not only new topics, but new ways to tell stories. When I started at the Tribune I could write the hell out of a story, but I couldn't shoot video or edit audio or take a picture worth a damn. So now I can do those things somewhat competently. And that's such an awesome opportunity, to be able to learn to tell stories in different ways.