I won't tell you that it's gonna be okay.

I won't tell you that it's going to be okay.

And welcome to another episode of Bakari Sellers podcast.

Today we actually have a friend, somebody who we read often,

talked to, used to talk to more than we talked to now I

guess that means I'm becoming irrelevant but that's okay none other than

Caitlin Bird how are you today? I am doing well and you are not irrelevant

Bakari.

I love it. We start each one of our episodes before we get into the news of the day by

asking our guests to walk us through the arc of their career.

So talk to me about your various career stops since finishing at UNC Asheville and talk a bit about your beat for the Charleston Post and Courier.

Wow, that's such a great thing because it's definitely a lot of zigzagging in my career so I actually while I was still a

student at UNC Asheville I actually freelanced for the local Alt Weekly in town picking up any sort of news I could for them, particularly health care or covering a city council race and helping out with election night coverage.

So I've been getting a taste for politics right from the beginning,

but who knew that I would end up being a senior politics

reporter at the posting courier.

But I zigzagged actually turned that freelance opportunity as a college student into a full-time paying job upon graduation,

stuck with it, moved to a smaller newsroom where I was an online news editor because I could kind of see that digital was going to be integral to doing my job and I wanted that on the resume not just in name only but to really understand how the internet works with the way that we get news out to our readers and to our neighbors.

And then I went back covering entrepreneurs in Western North Carolina for another paper

before ending up in the posting courier working on the digital desk at first, but I worked on a Sunday shift which meant I was writing those little hits anytime Lindsay Graham said something on a Sunday show or Tim

Scott on a Sunday show and the editors here said, you know you've got a real knack for this political

coverage thing. Do you want to do that for us full time? And I said, why not let's give it a go? Turn that into a job. Briefly worked at the state newspaper for about a year and a half as an enterprise reporter based in Charleston that was a great opportunity but I felt that tug of wanting to get back to full time political coverage and the posting courier said well we'd love to have you back.

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