PD online producer Elissa Chudwin: My journalism career was only a surprise to me

“Behind the Byline” introduces you to those who write stories, shoot photos, design pages and edit the content we deliver in our print editions and on pressdemocrat.com. We’re more than journalists. As you’ll see, we’re also your neighbors with unique backgrounds and experiences who proudly call Sonoma County home.

Today, we introduce you to Elissa Chudwin, one of our online producers.

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My career, in some ways, was an accident.

I took a journalism class in high school because I was so desperate to abandon an art class where I thought the teacher disliked me.

The class just had finished a self-portrait project that featured mosaic squares in multiple shades of one color. If done properly, the squares melded to create our facial features when you stood at a distance.

Or, if you were me, the yellow squares blended to look more like Pac-Man. And that image was hung in our school library for all to see.

I was completely mortified.

That — along with my work’s lack of finesse and the realization I often could not tell purple and blue apart — led me straight to the guidance counselor’s office. There, I begged to be added to any elective other than art the following semester.

I ended up in Ms. Galloy’s journalism class as a junior.

It didn’t take long for me to become enamored with journalism. I was a curious, observant and, to be honest, nosy-as-hell kid ― all skills that became useful when I started my career.

I mostly loved the idea of sharing the stories of people whose lives I thought were way more fascinating than my own. Journalism felt like the only socially acceptable way to ask strangers dozens of questions without being intrusive.

And in hindsight, I was collecting stories long before I walked into that classroom.

I am the only grandchild who didn’t meet my maternal grandfather, a Marine stationed in the Pacific during World War II.

He died a few years before I was born. Because of that, my grandma was adamant I get to know him through her stories. I spent countless weekends listening to her recount how they met and what she knew about his time as a paratrooper.

My paternal grandparents, who are Jewish, moved to Germany in 1948 when my grandpa, an U.S. Army doctor, was stationed there.

I couldn’t wrap my head around what it was like to live in a country so soon after its former government’s main goal was to annihilate people that were just like them.

Without knowing it, my grandparents were my first interview subjects. If I thought they were exaggerating or a timeline didn’t add up, I asked follow-up questions until I felt the story made sense.

I learned that sometimes even the most obvious questions have surprising answers.

My grandpa once said that he was more afraid of encountering Soviet Union troops than Nazis while in Germany because many were just as anti-Semitic.

When I told my family I wanted to be a journalist, the only person who seemed surprised was me.

I enrolled at the University of Missouri, totally unsure if I could manage the long hours or even find a job once I graduated.

My first job, though, was working for a series of weekly newspapers near my Chicago area hometown. About a year later, I moved to Dallas to work for a neighborhood magazine company. There, I wrote mostly features and interviewed everyone from a 100-year-old Holocaust survivor to a reality TV producer.

I was on cloud nine.

But around that time, I also became more interested in the digital side of things, and why some stories did well online while others didn’t.

That’s when I moved to Santa Rosa to become an online producer at The Press Democrat. You may see my byline, but most of what I do is behind the scenes.

Sometimes I’m deciding where stories land on our website’s homepage or what a headline says. Other times I’m designing a story’s digital presentation or responding to readers on social media. (Please, be kind.)

I also help monitor North Bay Q&A, which gives readers a chance to submit questions about anything and everything related to the region.

Engagement is a buzz word that is probably overused in journalism, but all it implies is that journalists directly are interacting with the communities they cover and sharing the stories they need most.

I think asking readers what makes them curious or what challenges they’re navigating only makes us better journalists. And I hope some of what I do contributes to more people seeing themselves on our site and in our pages.

I don’t forget how much trust it takes to share a piece of your life with a total stranger or to put it out there for your friends, co-workers and neighbors to read.

I can’t guarantee that I always do my job perfectly, but I can promise I’m listening when you tell us what we got right, and what we can do better.