MSJOY Acceptance Speech
4/24/08
Kelly Moffitt, Clayton High School
The Globe

Hello and thank you to the JEA and MIPA for bestowing this great honor upon me. Thank you to my peers on my staff at the Clayton High School Globe, especially my co-editor in Chief, Nava Kantor, my steadfast rock. Thank you to my brilliant newspaper adviser, Nancy Freeman who has trained me well as both a journalist and a human being. Thank you to my family, and to most of all my parents, who taught me from the moment I was born the importance of stories. From the princess stories my dad told me to get me to go to bed at night, to the books my mom tirelessly red at my bedside until I could read on my own...my parents instilled in me a love for characters, eloquence, and, above all, truth.

If you would have asked me in the fourth grade, sitting in the library as head copy editor for my elementary school’s “literary magazine” in my first journalistic position, if I would be standing here today receiving a journalist of the year award, standing at the brink of making a career out of my passion and love for journalism, I would have probably stared at you in dismay. After all, at that point, I was still set on becoming a prima ballerina in a space suit.

Fast forward to the eighth grade, after reading Autobiography of Katherine Graham of the Washington Post and you would find a completely different girl…one who had finally come to understand the exact difference a good story can make in one’s heart.

Here I stand, the result of four plus years of hard work, honing my technique, learning how to get the best stories out of the stingiest interviewees, challenging my staff to bring out their best, laying out page after page until it all comes together, patching quotes and back-story and facts together into a coherent piece of writing, learning to cut the wordiness that I am notorious for.

I have been given the opportunity as a student-journalist to interview students in Zimbabwe observing the famine there, to interview retired pilots refurbishing planes, to interview those at the head of the eminent-domain faceoff in my hometown, to interview mayors, principles, teachers, students, superintendents, to interview a kid who’d lost his best friend to leukemia, to interview parents about their worries that their kids are growing up to fast.

I have been given the opportunity to write reviews about movies I hated, columns about memories I love, feature stories about adopted children and mid-second-semester senior year transfer students, sports stories about what really is inside the trainers office. I have been given these opportunities on my high school paper, by my staff adviser, by my senior managing staff, by every journalist that has come before me…and it has made me hunger for more.

I am blessed to be able to continue feeding this hunger as a print-journalism major at the University of Southern California-Annenberg School for Communication for the fall of 2008.

People ask me why I love journalism and I must admit, sometimes I’m ashamed of the truth of it. Though I love making a difference in the world around me and shedding light on subjects often kept in the dark…the world of journalism for me holds something that I’ve never been able to understand on my own…my own story. It is journalism, through the quotes of those I interview for hours on end, through those hours I spend laboring over a page that just doesn’t look right, through those wee hours in the morning I spend starting at a screen wondering how I will ever get the inherent message of a piece through…it is journalism that has given me the chance to know myself through the world around me.

It is the greatest gift I’ve ever been given. And as I am a great believer in returning favors, I will continue with journalism until the day I die, in whatever shape or form I can…be it over the internet, in a newspaper, on the page of a magazine…journalism won’t die for me because I won’t let it. I hope you all won’t let it die for you either. It is my job, our job, to help everyone around us discover their stories the way I did mine…through our investigating, curiosity, reviewing, editing, typing, wordiness, interviewing…through our writing, our journalism, our story.

Thank you very much for this honor and look for me in the bylines…I plan to be continuing to uncover the story for many years to come.