A journalist’s reflection on the profound impact of reporting.
By Veronica Bianco for Grant Magazine
June 2023
I come from journalists.
My great-grandfather, Frank, whom I never met, was an ad copywriter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
My grandfather, Tom, whom I also never met, wrote for the Associated Press (AP) from the mountains of Aspen, Colorado, in the ‘40s. The letter he received from the AP soliciting his work hangs on the wall of a hallway in my home. I see it every time I come down the stairs. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, when he and my grandmother had settled in Copper Mountain, a tiny ski town flanked by the Tenmile Range, he started writing for the Copper Cable, a similarly tiny paper. He had a column called T.H.E. Resident Observer, which he wrote until he died in the late ‘80s.
My father, Anthony, is a history major who skipped graduate journalism school and went to work at Metals Week writing about the metal industry. Then he got hired at Bloomberg News, where he wrote about “billionaires behaving badly” for 24 years. When he and my mom moved from New York to Oregon, he continued reporting for Bloomberg from across the country. He biked to work in downtown Portland almost every day, and always told me when he “put a story to bed.” He left Bloomberg when I was in fourth grade to spend more time with his family, but he couldn’t stay away from reporting for long. Now, he works for Willamette Week, Portland’s arts and politics alt-weekly newspaper. He tells stories about reporting exploits in Yellowstone and Alaska and understands what it’s like to get hooked on a story.
My grandmother, who worked at the Copper Mountain post office, was just as influential as these journalists. Her greatest quality was her curiosity, and it was her mission to make every person she met feel like someone. Every time she got off the plane from Denver to Portland, she pointed to someone and told us all about her new best friend, the person who had sat next to her on the flight. She asked thoughtful questions and listened intently, and passed that quality down to my father and me. She died a year ago, and I miss her every day.
My mother can’t be overlooked either. Even though she isn’t a reporter, through her actions, she has taught me how to stand my ground in the face of criticism and never take anyone’s bullshit. She has shown me how to act with maturity and professionalism and is the kind of woman I want to be when I grow up.
Even though I had grown up surrounded by journalism, I fell in love with it on my own terms when Introduction to Journalism with Dylan Leeman unexpectedly appeared on my freshman year schedule. Reporting made sense to me, and I was good at it. I’ve always loved talking to people, and growing up around my father and grandmother taught me how to ask the right questions.
I loved the class. At the end of the year, it wasn’t even a question whether or not I would apply to Grant Magazine. The workload it brought did the opposite of scare me — I couldn’t wait to spend that much time reporting. I applied at the end of the year and was accepted.
My first year on staff was unremarkable — it was entirely online and we struggled collectively, only publishing one issue. I also struggled individually, unable to participate much because I was focused on recovering from knee surgery.
My journalism career actually began at the end of my sophomore year, when I pitched an article about a wave of student sexual assault allegations on Snapchat to Willamette Week. My instincts told me the flood of accusations and the outrage of my peers was a story, and they were right.
Willamette Week took a chance on me — a 16-year-old student with no real reporting experience — and for the following three months of my summer I interviewed alleged sexual predators, alleged victims, their parents, sexual assault experts and district officials. My first interview was shaky. My last one felt completely routine.
By the end of the summer, I had been told to stop reporting multiple times and threatened with lawsuits for what I was going to publish. For the record, the threats were empty — I had done nothing wrong. My adult sources patronized me and tried to mold my story to fit their narrative rather than the truth; they assumed that with youth comes naivety.
Their doubts became so clear that a senior Willamette Week reporter sat in on my interviews with district officials to make sure they took me seriously.
Through it all, I gained confidence, started to learn the ins and outs of real-life investigative journalism and discovered a feeling that I haven’t been able to stop chasing since.
Now, almost two years and seven Willamette Week stories later, when I Google my name, one of the results is an hours-long YouTube video of a man in sunglasses and a beanie railing against me and an article I wrote. The man in the video calls me a horrible person with no integrity and picks apart a story I wrote about the antinatalist organization he runs. At one point, he fills the screen with a picture of me. The juxtaposition of his serious attitude against an innocent, smiling-with-teeth photo of pre-makeup-discovery sophomore me is almost laughable.
The man in the video isn’t the only one who has said or written such things about me. After I inadvertently thrust myself into Portland’s professional journalism scene on the first day of my junior year, similar sentiments were commonplace. Someone had something to say about every story I wrote and published for Willamette Week. The negative comments generally preyed on my age — how could a junior in high school adequately cover the nuances of student-on-student sexual assault allegations?
The answer: I could do it better than anyone else. What some readers thought was my greatest weakness was actually my greatest strength — the story I wrote would never have become a reality had its author not been a teenager herself. My age gave me a real understanding of the issue at hand and allowed me to connect with my sources so that my reporting was as truthful and representative as possible.
The backlash I faced for my first story is yet another example of older generations discounting and disregarding the youth of today. The issues impacting my generation deserve a platform, and they deserve to be taken seriously when elevated.
Amidst the loud, negative criticism, though, was community support for the work I had done. People I hadn’t spoken to in years reached out to say thank you, and a middle school teacher in Portland even worked the story into her class’s curriculum.
All of the responses I received, both positive and negative, encouraged me to keep reporting. And I did, covering education, school overcrowding, high school sports and more.
About two years after I broke my first Willamette Week story, I worked with two other student reporters to expose a predatory high school sports reporter in an article for Grant Magazine. All three of us were female student-athletes, the exact demographic of his victims.
After the article’s publishing, countless professional reporters from Oregon and beyond reached out to express their appreciation for the work we had done, most of them specifically touting the great importance of student journalism.
While I was grateful for the recognition, it was also infuriating. A few of the journalists who reached out or posted their thanks explicitly said they had known about predatory behavior taking place for months, and yet none had taken the time to dig deeper, write about it or sound any public alarms. In this context, the responsibility of telling the story had fallen into the hands of the community that had been preyed upon.
I’ve been an editor-in-chief of Grant Magazine for the last two years, and my time in Portland is coming to a close. My life here has been shaped and defined by many things, but few have been as impactful as seeing this city and my community through the lens of a young female journalist. It is frustrating, and at times, thankless, but it is the most enriching work I’ve ever done. Through it all, I’ve learned and matured, and I’ve become the kind of young person that I know my grandmother would’ve been proud of, and the reporter that I know my father is proud of. I’ve loved every single second of it.
For a long time, when teachers or parents or friends asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I never had an answer. One day I would say “President!” Another day I would say “Soccer player!”
Despite journalism’s constant presence in my life, I never considered it a potential answer to that question until I wrote a story, got hooked and never went back.
I will keep investigating, writing and reporting, both for myself and my communities, and for the generations of journalists that came before me.
For the last three years, I’ve asked new Grant Magazine applicants what journalism means to them, but for a long time, I never thought about how I would answer.
For me, journalism is heritage and tradition. It brings me closer to my father and connects me to relatives I never met. It is accountability and a tool for social change. It is important, and it must be preserved, for me and for everyone.
