I felt wholly unprepared for a job as a logistics reporter. But I had been writing about business all along.

By Jensen Werley

Making the first drive between Gainesville and Jacksonville, I pulled over twice to look up the Wikipedia definition of “logistics.”

It was the days leading up to my Saturday graduation, and I was taking a breaking from shoving my apartment into garbage bags and snapping graduation photos of friends to make some money for the cruise I was taking the following week to interview for a job.

In the hour-and-a-half drive that I left three hours early for, I kept thinking about how I—a journalism student who bounced from wanting to report on the environment to wanting to write for magazines—now wanted to cover courts, crime and city council like most beginning, die-hard newspaper reporters.

So why was I interviewing to be the transportation and logistics reporter for the Jacksonville Business Journal?

The simple, and honest, answer is because I was graduating in six days and needed a job.

After that interview — and another one later in the week — I did get the job, and have been working at the JBJ for what is approaching three years.

When I got the job, I thought I was totally unprepared and unqualified. And in a lot of ways I was: I had never had a full-time journalism job, I had only a few internships, I was never even an editor at The Alligator.

But, in thinking of writing this essay, I realized that working for The Alligator, more than anything else I had done in journalism school, prepared me for this job as much as it can any first reporting gig.

…I realized that working for The Alligator, more than anything else I had done in journalism school, prepared me for this job as much as it can any first reporting gig.

Of course, there’s the obvious. Talking with my colleagues at the Jacksonville Business Journal—the two other reporters I work with are also UF J-School alumni—it’s unforgettable how the UF reporting class experience contains one notorious business story (I think it was about a small mining town, if I recall correctly) and that’s about it.

The rest of what we learn is important for learning how to report, interview and write, and stories we read were labeled “features,” “crime” or “profile.” But very little was ever a “business story.”

Looking back at my Alligator clips, I wrote more about business than I realized. There were stories about the expansion of emergency medical departments, the local effects of an employment discrimination bill and even a transportation-business story on the impacts of changing traffic lights. I had been writing about business all along.

Even more than the obvious was the talent I learned at The Alligator. There is something about the high standards an Alligator editor holds you to that forces a reporter to be the very best, learn quickly from mistakes and not repeat them.

When you look at business reporting, it’s really the reporting that is key. In my job, even if I am interviewing a vice president of emerging markets or digging through quarterly SEC filings on a public company I cover, ultimately what’s important is that I’m interviewing and digging. Interviewing, digging, reporting, writing. Just like at The Alligator. Just like I’ve always done.

Interviewing, digging, reporting, writing. Just like at The Alligator. Just like I’ve always done.

I get to cover business that are the backbone of Jacksonville, innovators that are changing industries and Fortune 500 companies. I do more than follow the money, I get to sit down and talk to the people who are deciding where the money goes.

Business reporting might not be one of the flagship programs at UF’s J-School. But the skills and talent needed to do it is as deeply ingrained in The Alligator as is covering student government or the university police.

Business reporting might not be one of the flagship programs at UF’s J-School. But the skills and talent needed to do it is as deeply ingrained in The Alligator as is covering student government or the university police.

Business reporting can be seen as stodgy, impersonal or boring. I’ve talked to a lot of my Alligator friends who told me they would never want my job.

But the reality is that what I do is exciting. And better still, it’s important.

Jensen Werley is a 2014 graduate of University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications. She also got a degree from UF in Sustainability Studies. She interned at the New York Post and Gainesville Sun and worked as a copy editor and staff writer for The Alligator. She now works for the Jacksonville Business Journal, where she has covered transportation, logistics, manufacturing, technology, retail and restaurants.