Meet the Green Bay Press-Gazette's new community and politics reporter: Jesse Lin

GREEN BAY — "Welcome to Wisconsin," said the DMV worker after sliding me a temporary driver's license with my newly voided Pennsylvania one.

It had felt like the state wanted me out right up to then.

I lost my passport while moving back home from New York City to Philadelphia in May. My permanent car registration was stuck in the mail somewhere between the East Coast and Green Bay. My Social Security card and birth certificate threw me for a loop with their disappearing-reappearing act. Even my new license was “NOT FOR FEDERAL PURPOSES” because of an address quirk.

Maybe I wasn’t meant to come here, I thought. A simple narrative with a one-syllable conclusion waiting at the end.

Leave.

But that violated what I wanted to do as the new Press-Gazette reporter: bring sincerity to my reporting.

By sincerity, I mean bringing an honest heart that witnesses the significant, if subtle, details that reveal a deeper emotional truth than just surface-level facts. The smallest moments that come and go often best make sense of the world, even while making it more complex. I believe it’s an approach that will give residents the most comprehensive view of their community and northeastern Wisconsin politics, the two topics I cover.

It’s also an approach I forgot in the DMV parking lot that July day, and nearly fell down a hole of oversimplified narrativizing because of it. Remembering the DMV worker’s eyes that crinkled as she smiled, her tone that said, “Welcome to Wisconsin. I mean it,” yanked me out.

I didn’t learn sincerity or only start appreciating the impact of small details at Columbia Journalism School , but I learned to harness and develop my method there.

It was a small moment that led me to journalism just two years ago.

I was 21, working at the front desk of Georgetown University ’s economics department to pay tuition.

My boss forwarded me an email with the subject line “Meet with Columbia Journalism School in D.C.!”

He remembered I had off-handedly mentioned that “Oh, I’m interested in journalism,” like how other 20-somethings are drawn to everything and nothing.

There were just over three months before applications were due.

I began my application with a scene in my hometown in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley . There was the two-story brick elementary school . The school bus dropped me off at the only Chinese restaurant in my 1,800-person town five minutes away on Main Street, my parents’.

“I've never been a part of my family's story," I wrote. "There was never much to say in our home. My Chinese was as broken as their English, so we never shared our lives with each other. I never want anyone to feel as I did: unseen, unheard, and uncared for just because stories couldn't be shared.”

I had applied to Columbia before. Rejection.

And the idea of learning how to report and write at "journalism school" sounded unnecessary and rich, especially coming from an Ivy League.

I talked to a friend recently to speculate why our applications got us in. Allegedly, “they look for outsiders,” she said. It echoed what one of my professors told us the first day of class: “Outsiders make the best journalists.”

Reporting from day one in New York City’s August muck was anything but cushy . The dirt we would get on our hands, like the clay I played in behind my parents’ restaurant, was what convinced me to apply.

There would be no textbook learning, just 8 million individual stories going about their lives.

We had the liberty to choose which kinds of stories we wrote about. What we gravitated toward revealed a bit of our characters.

I chose to take trains to public housing slated for demolition in an increasingly unaffordable city . I stayed with the public housing residents for seven months, combed through hundreds of documents, and sat in on hours of meetings.

From all of that, I decided to begin the story in a kitchen. A public housing resident was smoking, her asthma medication and a crucifix watching from the counter. She was tired of feeling small against the city and large developers. The depleting pack of Newports entering her emphysema-ed lungs showed it best.

By the end, I had written on topics from a once-bustling commercial street on Staten Island that has stagnated for decades despite millions in investment projects to what a new $15 charge to drive into Manhattan would mean for musicians forced to live outside of the city but whose work was almost entirely inside its boundaries.

Now, in Green Bay, I hope to continue what I started at Columbia. My guiding principle, boiled down to its essence, is what a friend told me as I sat in the passenger seat of his Prius: “Society’s in dire need of sincerity.”

I took this job knowing my mandate is to "help readers navigate their lives ... covering city government and its actions in a way that centers on residents and how their lives are affected."

My work in the driver’s seat is to show readers as much of the mountain view as possible while listening to the passenger tell what’s important to them.

What’s most important is often in what's unsaid, in the pauses, the hesitations, the smiles, and the laughter.

In the stories I’ve written so far, I could’ve left out how referendum questions were written on the same level as academic papers , the smiles at the approval of Green Bay’s first mixed-use development , the tears from a dad at the Department of Public Works’ response to his request for a four-way stop for his deaf-blind son.

Stories are about people, not referendums or development sites or stop signs. The truth in those stories about fear, hope, and care would've been reduced without those details.

And in politics that so often stays on the level of referendums and development sites, I believe sincerity is crucial to capture the smallest details that reveal our society's most personal and universal emotions and ideals.

The fear and anger of northeastern Wisconsin Republicans after the Democratic National Convention at what they viewed as a lack of care and attention to many Americans' lived experience came out as pointed language and acerbic allusions. The Democrats' anguish after Vice President Kamala Harris suddenly became the front-runner candidate for her party was displayed in a willingness to go "all in" in a matter of hours that American political history had no precedent for.

I’m here to take you for a ride through all of it. Sit in the passenger seat, be my navigator.

Introducing a new weekly column answering your questions about Green Bay

So what questions about Green Bay are you still trying to wrap your head around?

Reach out to jlin@gannett.com or call 920-431-8247 to be part of a new weekly column answering your questions about greater Green Bay that aren't just a Google search away, similar to what Duke Behnke has been doing about Appleton at the Post-Crescent for years.

Each week, I'll learn everything there is to know about one reader question and come back with an answer every Monday morning.

Jesse Lin is a reporter covering the community of Green Bay and its surroundings, as well as politics in northeast Wisconsin. Contact him at 920-431-8247 or jlin@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Meet the Green Bay Press-Gazette's new community and politics reporter: Jesse Lin