BAMMA 05' Commencement Speech

This is the text of the commencement speech by Kamika Dunlap, Metro Reporter for the Oakland Tribune, delivered on July 2, 2005.

KEEP IT REAL

Good morning and thank you for inviting me to be your 2005 BAMMA commencement speaker. I congratulate you all on the success of completing your two-week summer journalism program. Creating and designing your own print and online news publication is a tremendous achievement.

Twelve years ago, I graduated from the BAMMA program, so I can relate to the sense of accomplishment you must feel after spending long days and nights reporting, writing, editing, filing photos, designing news pages, writing headlines and of course meeting deadlines. You should be excited and proud to see that all your hard work has finally paid off.

You have had such a full and enriching learning experience in a short amount of time. But there is one thing I want to share with you, if you haven’t figured it already. Journalism isn’t really about reporting and writing. It’s about caring. Caring about yourself and the people around you. It’s about fostering relationships so that people will want and look to you to tell their stories.

Journalism is about cultivating sources. Without good sources you don’t have a story. The first step to building a rapport with others is being real with yourself. Your handshake is just as powerful as any word you write.

In journalism you will be thrown into experiences when you’ll need to be able to quickly gain the confidence of others. On the first day at my new job I had to write a story about a homicide victim. A 16-year-old Oakland high school student was recently gunned down in front of his house on what should have been one of the proudest days of his life. I needed to interview his mother for the next day’s paper and her son hadn’t even been dead for four hours. I had to express to her my sympathy yet still explain that I needed her to describe what happened. She told me how she had just came back from a presentation her son made at school and how proud she was of him. She told me how well he was doing in his classes and that his teacher’s praised him. After his presentation her son stayed behind at school and took the bus home later that evening. He was shot in the neck only a few feet from his front door. But he still had enough life in him to stagger to the front door and then collapse in front of his mother on the living room floor. As she described how she lost her only son I had to fight back my tears. I went back to the paper and filed my story. The next day his mother called to thank me for the article I wrote about her son in the paper. That phone call made my day.

So know, that your best work tends to happens when you keep it real.

Journalism is also about listening. Writing is a good skill to have but listening is just as important. If you listen long enough people will tell you everything you want to know. When you listen you hear the details like what I heard when a former gang member told me that when she was two years old her father would tuck crack cocaine in her diaper and used her to distribute dope on the streets of Chicago.

So, what I’m really telling you is that journalism is more than about reporting and writing. It’s about being real and showing people that they can really trust you to listen and to tell their stories.

I also want you to trust the fact that participating in the BAMMA program and gaining the skills and experience you have over two weeks is a foundation that you can go out and build upon. So, whether you go out and write a book, become a lifelong journalist or go into communications you need to let people know that they can trust you.

And trust when you look at me that you can go out and do the same things I’ve done and more. You can go out and tell the same stories I’ve told and better ones. But just remember to be you and to keep it real.

Thank you and congratulations.