Emily Sweeney, AS’98

I’m always looking for stories. That’s my job, and I love it.

Since joining the staff of the Boston Globe eight years ago, I’ve reported on all kinds of stories. I’ve rushed down to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to the scene of a fire. I’ve covered a clown convention. I’ve shot a gun (while researching an all-women gun club). I’ve been chased by swarms of mosquitoes in the Blue Hills.

When I’m not out in the field conducting interviews and taking notes, you can find me working at Globe headquarters, on Morrissey Boulevard. The building is a familiar place to me because it’s in Dorchester (my neighborhood) and because I worked there as a co-op.

It’s also where I decided I wanted to pursue a journalism career.

My Globe co-op experience in the late 1990s gave me a firsthand look at life inside a newsroom. I was one of several co-op students assigned to the City Desk—a rectangular cluster of desks and phones and monitors that serves as the Globe’s eyes and ears. The phones rang incessantly. Readers called with tips and story ideas. Reporters in the field called to provide updates on whatever they were covering. Sources called looking to talk to specific writers. We’d get inquiries from people who wanted to know how to subscribe to the paper, what the weather was going to be tomorrow, whether the Globe knew the answer to a trivia question that had been stumping them.

The Globe’s cadre of co-ops were expected to be skillful multitaskers, capable of watching three TV news broadcasts at the same time. We listened to the scratchy voices on the police scanner, jotted down the stories WBZ Radio was reporting, and kept an eye on the wires for breaking news. We transcribed interview tapes for reporters, called up hospitals to learn the conditions of the unlucky souls injured in car crashes and fires, and occasionally got to write blurbs for the “News in Brief” column (known as “nibs” in Globe-speak) that appeared on page two of the Metro/Region section.

When news broke, the desk editor would summon a reporter over while I scrabbled with keys to unlock a glass cabinet where several large gray cell phones were kept, making sure the reporter grabbed one before rushing out the door.

Following successful stints on the City Desk, I got to fill in for other co-ops at the Globe’s bureaus in the State House, the Suffolk Superior Court, and Boston City Hall. Each bureau provided me with an invaluable learning experience.

After graduating from Northeastern, I went to work as a reporter at several small newspapers, won some journalism awards, then returned to the Globe in 2001. It was good to be back. It still is.

Much has changed since I was a co-op. Cell phones are no longer a rare commodity, kept under lock and key. Now Globe reporters and photographers are armed with video cameras and laptops.

It’s an interesting time to be working for a news­paper, but I’m very optimistic about the future. I’ve seen so many changes in just a few short years, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty more down the road. But one thing won’t change: the fact that people like to know things. There will always be a demand for news, and information, and analysis.

So if you have story ideas or tips, send ’em my way.

Emily Sweeney is a staff reporter at the Boston Globe. She is the president of the New England chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), and was recently appointed to SPJ’s digital media committee. She can be reached at <esweeney@globe.com>.