I don’t see these pursuits as distractions. They’re part of the same project: finding truth, making meaning, connecting with audiences. That’s what storytellers do. A simple Venn diagram says it all: Journalist + Screenwriter = Storyteller. Do you see similar walls in your own field?

The question I keep returning to: has journalism become too rigid to recognize multidimensional storytellers? If so, what are we losing? Perhaps the issue isn’t credibility but control; an insistence that the field remain narrowly defined, even as the world demands broader narratives.

That’s why “storyteller” resonates with me more than “journalist” or “screenwriter.” Good reporting requires imagination; good fiction requires truth. The skills overlap. The forms inform each other. And yet, our industry still clings to rigid categories that leave little room for hybridity.

Over the years, I stopped seeing my work as competing lanes. I write, I produce, I direct, I teach. Journalism matters deeply to me, but so does creative writing. Both sharpen the other. At their core, they’re not opposites, they’re extensions of the same impulse: to tell stories.

When I began screenwriting in 2016, I was warned it could “damage my credibility.” Some editors said fiction would undermine my journalism. This fear reveals something: not about storytelling, but about journalism’s insecurity. Why does the profession resist multidimensional identities?

Freelancers live this tension acutely. Hiring managers too often view them as “less serious” than staff reporters. Yet freelancing demands more: self-discipline, business acumen, creativity, and resilience. It’s not a gap in credibility, it’s a test of versatility that rarely gets acknowledged.

I wish I’d read those words back in college. Still, I’m grateful for the reminder to keep writing, producing, directing—and putting my work out into the world. I cringe thinking about how much weight I gave to opinions that never really mattered throughout my 20s and early 30s.

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