(Editor’s note: This article is part of an occassional series featuring new Columbus Dispatch journalists and their work in our community.)
Long before I learned to read, I loved words.
As my mom loves to recount, 2-year-old me had quite the peculiar knack for memorizing books. My personal favorite inexplicably being “Salt in His Shoes: Michael Jordan in Pursuit of a Dream,” a picture book written by the legendary athlete’s mother about how he overcame self-doubt as a young boy so he could go on to fulfill his basketball dreams.
If you know me personally today, you’ll understand what I mean when I say I cannot, for the life of me, comprehend my toddler-age fascination with this book.
For whatever reason, from the very first time my mom read it to me, I was hooked. And I was consistently hooked the next 365 or so bedtimes, when I insisted upon reading – rather, hearing – the same story again and again every night for a year.
Sitting there in my pink jammies and blonde blunt baby bob, mouthing along the prose of my nighttime stories and exposing my mom every time she tried to sneakily skip a page, something took root in me. I didn’t understand the symbols on the page or why they made the sounds they did, but I understood that when you put them all together, they make magic.
Twenty years later, my own audience may not be toddlers, but I hope to create a little magic of my own.
Contrary to what now seems like a kismet young love of stories, I never really pictured myself a journalist until college. An author? Maybe. An actor? I hoped so. But “reporter” was just never a calling I felt as a kid.
A middle school aptitude test, many years and a video-journalism high school internship later, that changed.
I came to Columbus for Ohio State, where I studied journalism, political science, Spanish and media production & analysis. I wrote for The Lantern – the university’s student newspaper – my first two years, then spent the next two as an editor.
Being Editor-in-Chief my senior year was without doubt the most challenging thing I’ve ever done, and I owe pretty much everything I’ve since accomplished in my professional life to that experience. That may sound dramatic given that I’ve only had about eight months’ worth of a professional life, but it’s true – my Lantern colleagues and that weathered, windowless, fluorescently-lit newsroom (conveniently replaced with a new space the year after I left, not that I’m bitter about it) will always have my heart.
I led a small team of editors, photographers, video producers and designers through an utterly wild year of news. A year of massive and frequent campus protests, a university Title IX investigation, a U.S. presidential election, a national championship, international student visa revocations, the closing of DEI offices and programming, an Ohio higher education overhaul bill and a class action lawsuit over mushrooms in a campus dorm.
For context, there were less than 25 of us running a news outlet for one of the biggest universities in the country, and we were all full-time students with other jobs and/or internships. So you’ll understand why I like to give that staff its flowers.
I graduated May 5, 2025. The next morning, I started a summer reporting internship with The Columbus Dispatch. What was supposed to be a 10-week position turned into a 24-week one, and I officially became this newsroom’s trending business and real estate reporter in October.
These past few months have been my first living in Columbus outside the Ohio State bubble, and to say I’ve learned a lot would be the understatement of the year. Who knew I could be so impassioned about zoning and area commissions and affordable housing and residential market trends!
With northwest neighborhoods and suburbs like Clintonville, the Short North, Grandview and Upper Arlington also a part of my beat, I’ve come to better understand the coexisting cultures within Columbus and how they’re responding to change in the city.
But more fun than all the learning and the reading and the writing in this job is I guess the very thing that got me into it in the first place: witnessing firsthand the power of stories. I work alongside reporters whose talent is equal parts inspiring and intimidating. The words they’ve written have sparked action in so many ways that each day I’m renewed in my conviction that whatever challenges or changes our society undergoes, journalism will never go away.
It brings me such pride to be associated with these people, and I hope one day to make the kind of magic they’ve made with their writing.
Because I may not remember the words to “Salt in His Shoes” anymore, but I still remember the way they made me feel. And that’s what a good story can do.
Reporter Emma Wozniak can be reached at ewozniak@dispatch.com or @emma_wozniak_ on X, formerly known as Twitter.
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