Dear Mr. Clooney,
I’m writing this letter today to follow-up on what you stated in your August 2010 Bob Hope Humanitarian Award recipient speech, broadcast on the Prime Time Emmy Awards show.
You said that you were “hoping that some very bright person…at home watching, can find a way to keep the spotlight burning on these heartbreaking situations that continue to be heartbreaking long after the cameras go away. That would be an impressive accomplishment.”
For five months, I’ve waited and I’ve watched and I’ve wondered. Would someone create a position of Humanitarian Reporter? And if so, who would do so and when could I apply?
But I’ve not heard a thing more since you gave your speech last August. No one—no “bright person”—has found a way to keep “heartbreaking situations…burning bright.”
So I am stepping forward and I would like to put this idea forth: Instead of waiting for someone else to create the position of Humanitarian Reporter, I challenge you to create the position yourself and I want to be the woman who secures the job.
I want you to hire me because I have been preparing for this particular journalist position for well over a decade. As a newspaper, magazine and online journalist since the mid-1990’s, I have consciously chosen to write with the highest ethics. I’ve chosen to write with three guiding principles: Integrity, Dignity and Excellence—both for my work and for the people I write about. But the most transformative writing of my career has been my most recent work and it’s also the writing I am the most proud of.
I have spent the past two years as an Arts & Entertainment Reporter, but an A&E writer who refused to write celebrity gossip and instead focused my work on inspiring people in the arts, as well as social justice and feminist issues, like marriage equality, media responsibility and feminist authors and artists.
Through the people I have had the great fortune to interview, I have come to be a vocal straight ally for the LGBT community and started FAIR is FAIR, an online pledge and community of supporters who believe in responsible, accurate and FAIR media representation and coverage of LGBT people. (FAIR is FAIR currently has several hundred members around the world.)
I am also a celebrity interviewer and arts correspondent for a weekly LGBT radio show, broadcast nationally out of Atlanta. It’s been amazing meeting and interviewing people around the country and sharing their stories with the show’s listeners.
Your humanitarian example has inspired me in part to do these important articles and interviews versus the negative, gossip-driven celebrity muck that most A&E writers pass off as “journalism.”
Becoming a Humanitarian Journalist would enable me to continue writing stories such as these and to expand to covering other global humanitarian issues as well.
I want to do more than just celebrity interviews. I want to change the life of women and children, both here at home and around the world. As a woman in her early 40’s, this is the decade of my life that can make the biggest impact. I want to use my 40’s in writing about people and issues that really need to be shared, discussed and to help implement change where needed.
Just as journalist Lisa Ling left behind co-hosting a popular television talk show because she felt a calling to cover more relevant and powerful stories (and was later hired by Oprah Winfrey), I want to do the same. I want each article that I write to impact the most people about the most important issues of our time.
I hope you’ll take up my challenge, Mr. Clooney, and give me a call. I am ready to start work today.
N. E. Francis
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