By Sadie Fisher
I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, packed with paper mills and power plants. I lived alongside working-class adults and quickly learned the power of a good work ethic, determination, and tenacity.
Producer Mary Murphy also grew up in a small town. Just thirty minutes outside of Providence, Rhode Island, her hometown was full of blue-collar folks working in mills. “I think it was really good to have spent the first 14 years of life in a small working-class town,” Murphy said. “It was just really good training for life.”
Her father became more and more successful with his career and because of how small Rhode Island is — Murphy became accustomed to brushing shoulders with powerful people.
“I think that that really helped me as a reporter,” Murphy said. “I didn’t shirk from talking to people and I wasn’t afraid of power or timid in the face of power.”
She is now an Emmy award-winning writer, producer, and director. She started as a columnist at the New York Post and had a few more reporting jobs before transitioning to CBS News as a producer.
Now — she has her own production company where she’s created projects, films, and documentaries, including her work for PBS on author Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and the life of Helen Keller — but that wasn’t always her dream.
“I loved books,” she said. “I thought, you know, being an editor or working for an editor or some way, being around books would be really great.” Murphy graduated with an English degree and went to publishing school — but her curiosity and determination to get a job landed her first reporting gig. She heard a columnist speak at a college lecture and decided to send her resume to him.
The reason she got an interview and the job? “My dad was an accountant, and he was outfitting his entire office with computers which was like a big deal and nobody else had done that.” She went with his employees to an institute to learn word processing – using a groundbreaking piece of technology at the time. And because of this curiosity to learn, she became a columnist at the New York Post.
Her career in hard news ended when she left CBS in 2005 — and that’s when she let her passions take over. “I was out on the street trying to figure out what to do next and I did a variety of things,” she said. “And then what I did was my To Kill a Mockingbird movie, which I kept calling my love project.”
That love for what you do is what Murphy said journalists need to have. “If you really want to do something just keep doing it.” It may be hard, she said, but if you love it, it will be worthwhile. And although she said news cycles have changed and the way people ingest their news have shifted, the role of journalists will always stay the same.
“I think everybody needs journalists. I think it’s in the public interest.” Murphy firmly believes, “It’s always going to be important and valuable.” New journalists, she noted, must be diligent with what they see online and that “you should never take what anyone says at face value.”
She understands that it’s easy to fall down the trap of trying to be right or proving a point — but that journalists need to remember that it’s important to stay out of that mindset. “It’s not our jobs as journalists to win an argument or to even engage in an argument,” Murphy said. “It’s our job to report it down the middle and that isn’t always popular right now, but it’s very necessary.”
Murphy didn’t let curiosity kill the cat — in fact — it’s the thing that has kept her career going. “I think you have to stay curious. I learned to be resourceful and to have the conviction of knowing I had a good idea.”
As my college career ends and my journalism career begins, I’m going to keep my curiosity alive and focus on the truth. And I’m well on my way to joining Mary Murphy as a journalist from a small mill town.