Editor’s note: The Daily’s editorial department acknowledges that this article is premised on a conflict of interest. This article is a special feature for Daily Week that does not represent the Daily’s standard journalistic practices.
Chloe Courtney Bohl (LA’24), Julia Shannon-Grillo (LA’24) and Summer Maxwell (LA’24) joined The Tufts Daily at different points in their undergraduate years, with different goals and on different sections of the paper. Their work on the Daily led them toward career paths that aligned with one overarching passion: journalism.
Courtney Bohl is currently a reporter at the INDY Week, covering the North Carolina Research Triangle through a program with Report for America. On the Daily, she served as the executive news editor, editor-in-chief and finally as investigative editor.
Before graduating from Tufts, Shannon-Grillo served as an executive copy editor, managing editor, editor-in-chief and editorial board chair. She is now a Stabile investigative reporter at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Maxwell is in her first year of a masters’ program in journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism after serving as a deputy features editor in her time on the Daily.
Each alumna was drawn to the Daily for different reasons. For Courtney Bohl, news writing had interested her since high school. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she wanted to gain connections and report on local and university stories.
“Life on campus was very restricted, and I knew that I loved writing and was interested in journalism, but had never done it,” Courtney Bohl said. “My high school didn’t have a school paper, and I thought that joining the Daily would be a cool way to find some community in this kind of weird and lonely time, and also get to know Tufts and Medford and Somerville through the lens of reporting.”
Shannon-Grillo joined the copy section her first-year fall and edited remotely. Her interest in journalism did not stem from an interest in writing.
“I had journalism experience from high school, and I had gone through a censorship when I was editor of my high school paper that received a lot of national attention,” Shannon-Grillo said. “So I was very passionate about student media rights. I had this very strong sense of belonging in the journalism world, but it just wasn’t necessarily as a reporter.”
Maxwell joined the features section her junior spring after taking a political journalism class with Professor Eitan Hersh in the fall.
“I really, really liked it. I thought it was really cool. So then I was like: How do I keep doing this? I should probably start writing for the Daily,” Maxwell said. “So then I did a semester at the Daily, and I thought it was really fun, and I loved how much creativity I was allowed.”
After that semester, she said she felt inspired to learn more about journalism and began considering journalism school to equip herself with more formal experience.
All three discussed their biggest takeaways from their time at the Daily and how it has set them up for their futures.
“Now when I’m out in the non-Tufts world, and it’s not quite as supportive or kind, but because I have that good foundation laid [where] I was able to build those skills in a really safe, supportive environment, I now feel confident approaching bigger projects,” Maxwell said.
“I think working for the Daily was a great opportunity to be doing news that was extremely community-driven, and really showed me what it’s like to be doing journalism as a public service,” Courtney Bohl said. “And every story that we did was filling a gap. Nothing was redundant.”
From her experience as a copy exec and being on the managing board, Shannon-Grillo learned a different skill set.
“The Daily definitely taught me how to edit,” she said. “But then the human art of editing, which is such a big piece of it, and learning how to keep a writer’s voice throughout a piece, and also just how to communicate the changes that you want to make.”
Shannon-Grillo, Courtney Bohl and Maxwell offered wisdom to staff, leaders and anyone remotely interested in joining the Daily.
“Reach out to the alumni network. It’s actually a pretty strong alumni network for how small our paper is,” Shannon-Grillo said. “I also think that there’s a journalism role for everyone, and it doesn’t have to just be news reporting.”
Courtney Bohl provided a message for Daily leaders and anyone interested in leadership roles.
“Your title on the masthead doesn’t matter nearly as much as the experience that you’re gleaning from it — and to do the Daily doesn’t have to mean that you’re on a pre-ordained path to a leadership role,” she said. “You can take this experience and make whatever you want out of it, and just give it a try, read a lot, talk to people and just go for it and see what happens.”
Maxwell encouraged writers to practice their writing and reporting skills.
“I don’t necessarily think that practice makes perfect, because we can all always improve, but practice does make better,” she said. “The more people that you interview, the more comfortable you’ll feel doing it. The more cold emails you send asking people to give you their time, the more comfortable you’ll feel doing it. And the more times you write, the better you’ll get at it.”
The three Tufts graduates are still figuring things out, but they cite their previous journalistic work as crucial to their futures.
“I’m still really trying to figure out if journalism is a career path that will afford me that space to breathe and take a step away from my work because I feel like the stereotype — and there’s truth in it — is that journalism is this all-consuming field, and you can’t turn it off,” Courtney Bohl said. “You have to be available 24/7 and it’s so intense. And some of that is appealing to me, because I like to feel like I’m doing work that matters.”
“I’m hoping to go into traditional print media, working at a newspaper, whether that be online or in print, to get my start,” Maxwell said. “Right now my interests are business and politics.”
“I would love to go back to editing,” Shannon-Grillo said. “We’ll see how much reporting happens first. In the long run, I see myself editing, working as the publisher of a news outlet or representing newsrooms as a lawyer.”
