As any good journalist will tell you, the experiences and knowledge you accumulate outside journalistic studies are just as valuable as the experience and knowledge you gain in your career.
This is something Darcie Grunblatt knows all too well. Grunblatt had a lifelong interest in the news but wasn’t enchanted with the idea of the news being her end game. Instead, she went into campaigning.
As a campaigner, she witnessed bad blood in highly partisan environments in Pennsylvania, seeing her urban left-wing views clash with those of firmly red counties.
But Grunblatt was fearless. She was able to shake it off and grow into one of the finest journalists this writer knows.
She arrived at The Jerusalem Post and has forged a reputation of excellence. As one of our breaking news desk managers, she has the electric touch for keeping our team working hard and covering the news efficiently.
In Jerusalem sat down with Grunblatt to discuss her life and career.
What brought you to Israel?
I made aliyah after participating in MASA. After my internship at the Manufacturers Association of Israel and talking to several mentors there, I decided to apply for jobs, even though my Hebrew was still at a beginner’s level.
Tell me about your work in campaigning
As a field organizer, my job was to make cold calls and knock on doors to build a volunteer base in a certain set of counties in the state I was in. When I recruited volunteers, I would train them how to talk to undecided voters and how to instruct supporters to vote by mail.
I started out on Michael Bloomberg’s campaign. After Joe Biden won the primaries, I applied to work in the same position in Pennsylvania. Within Pennsylvania, the middle area in between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia is called the “T.” It is very rural, mountainous, and conservative. There were more KKK members than Democrats in my counties. Residents would say how angry they were at the Democrats for ignoring rural communities, saying thousands of people in these areas switched to the Republican side, as they were tired of empty promises.
Every day, I drove past hundreds of Trump signs, Confederate flags, crosses, and swastikas. I felt the lack of infrastructure in these areas. My calls would constantly cut out while driving between cities. There was no radio in the mountains. The roads were like switchback ski slopes. By the end of the campaign, I became an advocate for rural PA. Biden’s campaign promise of Build Back Better grew, not only from consultants but also from the feedback my team members gave to the Democratic Party.
After the election, I finished university and decided to spend a year in Israel. I wanted to earn money, so I found a month-long job in New York working as a field organizer for a progressive candidate. Most people I spoke to were concerned about crime, specifically hate crimes against Jews and Asians. The owner of a kosher deli told me that he’d had to replace his windows because kids had thrown rocks at his store. One man said his Chinese wife was assaulted on the street. I told this to the candidate I worked for, suggesting it could be one of her talking points. She told me she did not want to be a tough-on-crime candidate. She lost the election to a woman whose parents were Holocaust survivors. During this election, I learned how important it is for candidates to listen to their voters and why those who assume they know what their voters want will always lose.
What got you interested in journalism?
I was always interested in politics and journalism. In high school, I was co-editor-in-chief of my school newspaper. When I was a kid, my mom would play NPR every morning. I was surrounded by journalists because my mom was a publicist.
Prior to the Post, I dismissed journalism as a career because I knew the pay is low. Fortunately, sometimes the career finds you.
What brought you to the ‘Post’?
My friend from MASA referred me at the beginning of the war. She told me the work was really interesting and the people were nice. I had worked for an economic consulting company after my internship and needed a change.
After working at the Post for over a year and a half, I will say that I made the right choice, and it is hard to imagine myself elsewhere. There are some things that make me really proud to work for the Post, particularly certain aspects of our style guide that differentiate us from other international English newspapers.
Tell me something about the job most people don’t know
When there’s breaking news, there is fog. Often we have to choose what to cover and what not to cover, and also how to cover it. We also have to try to make sure our information is accurate and sourced well.
I have to make decisions without knowing what will happen in five minutes. I remember when HTS took over Syria and ousted Assad. I had to figure out what was going on, and then guide a team of writers on how to cover it. It can be very confusing, and our job is to find the facts.
Sometimes in covering the facts, narratives get lost. Sometimes we have facts, and then some speculative information that we cannot report on may change the whole story, so if that information is not used, the story may not be accurate.
There have been stories I have covered that I have lost sleep over because I felt I did not stress a certain detail enough or that I put certain information too low down in the story so nobody would read it.
What if you call massacres ‘clashes’? What if you call wars ‘genocides’? What if you call genocides ‘conflicts’? What if you call militants ‘terrorists’ and terrorists ‘militants’?
These are the dilemmas we face almost weekly, and decisions need to be made in minutes. Many of our articles will be used [by readers] to learn about this time from a historical perspective. What if the correct story is lost because the reporting is not accurate?
What advice do you have for aspiring journalists?
Start interviewing people early. Get on a breaking news desk. Read as many books as you can about as many topics as you can. Try to find mentors who are critical of your writing. It is always nice to have people telling you that you are doing a great job all the time, but it is not helpful, and it will not make you better.