Samantha Go
Professional Portfolio 

Q: What do you do for a living?

A: I work at the Montrose Daily Press as a reporter.

Q: What does journalism mean to you?

A: I started working in journalism kind of as an accident. I was a public relations major and ended up dropping out of school when Covid started and working for the local newspaper was the way that I was able to make a living, so that was kind of how I started doing it. Since then it’s been my way of making a living and that’s what it means to me. 

Q: What made you decide to do journalism?

A: I found myself there and the more I did it, I went back to school and started working for the school magazine. I realized it was a job that would give me a lot of opportunity to do something different everyday and to get to know and work with a lot of people. …I considered specializing in training and learning a lot about fitness or nutrition, but instead I could interview somebody on that, write an article, and the next day I could be climbing a mountain and writing about that. The next day I could be talking to a local business owner who just opened up their business, so I really love the variety of it and I think that was what attracted me to the field and convinced me to stay here.

Q: Tell me more about what it was like to get to where you are now. 

A: I was working for that newspaper in Miami and then when I went back to school I became the executive editor of the school magazine, Distraction, and that was very much the Cosmopolitan for college so we were always doing fun articles. I had a huge hand in the creative process and not just writing the copy but planning out what articles we were going to have in the magazine and editing everybody’s [article]. From there, that’s what made me feel like I really wanted to do something like this. I got accepted to a program called Report for America, which takes early-career journalists and matches them up with newsrooms in areas that need a little bit more coverage than the local news outlets can afford to hire, so they had sent me the job listing in Ouray county, and that was when I googled Ouray, Colorado and I was like “Oh my God, yeah I’m going to go there.” I saw the mountains, it was stunning; I’d never seen anything like it. So that was how I came out here. 

Q: What do you think has been your most memorable experience so far? 

A: I do a lot of our outdoors reporting so I convinced everybody to let me go climb Handies Peak and put it on the clock and write about it, so that was a lot of fun. That was my first fourteener and I got to turn around and make content out of it that ended up being a hiking guide that was one of the most read articles on our website that week. 

Q: Do you have any advice for people who are looking to get into this career path? 

A: Definitely look into it if it interests you. Also be aware that it’s a segue to other careers, that a background in journalism can also be experience that can lead you toward being qualified for copywriter positions, public relations positions, marketing, and don’t be afraid to develop those skills and don’t feel like you’re selling out if you work as a journalist for five or six years, and you get an opportunity to do PR marketing with a company you really believe in, take it. There’s very few people that are going to be able to make a really good living off of journalism, and people should know that going in. It’s not cool or honorable to not take a good paycheck because you think your job is really important. In a way I applaud people that do that but it’s something that gets told to journalists, something that gets told to teachers, to a lot of people that do a lot of work that’s undervalued and don’t accept a crappy paycheck, like make sure you can take care of yourself at the end of the day. Work-life balance is as important as doing your dream job.