Profile on Darcel Rockett
An in-depth profile written during undergrad on renowned Chicago journalist Darcel Rockett. The piece combined interviews, narrative reporting, and archival research to explore their career and influence on the city’s media landscape.
By Isabella Mansfield
Darcel Rocket, digital editor and features reporter for The Chicago Tribune, finds that most days are the same, in that no two are alike. “It’s never dull! That’s why I went into journalism. Every day is different,” she says.
On this particular morning she is met with 6 outstanding stories, all in different phases of being made ready for print, including coordinating interviews, photographers and of course, writing. Rockett states she's lucky, as she's passionate about every story she writes. In fact finds herself at a place in her career where she’s able to seek out and initiate all stories that interest her, the most interesting currently being her task to write the obituary of Dr. Timuel Black, activist, author, historian and Chicago native, who died recently at 102 years old. Rockett was tasked with fleshing out the details of his impressive life before he passed, talking to as many students, colleagues, and friends of his as she could, including Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama. Though her career hasn’t always been writing about her passions such as Black activists and social justice, passion has been what has led her all the places she's gone. “My curiosity is basically the driving force towards all the things that I want to do,” says Rockett.
Rockett is a smiley talker, who loves telling her own stories as much as she loves hearing them. Her parents were West Siders who met and fell in love in high school, they would both become 1st generation Black graduates of Illinois State University and had six children, Darcel being the 2nd oldest and the only girl. They set out to raise their children in Normal, Illinois, but after a few years decided the lack of color in the town was abnormal, and they moved back to Chicago to be around family and a more diverse community. “I remember my mom making a point to say that's what she wanted for us,” says Rockett.
Rockett describes herself as a nomad out of necessity, being prone to boredom. This wanderlust, as well as her need to express herself, is what led her to her journalism. Though always a voracious reader, spending her weekends at the library, and loving to talk, she first saw herself growing up to be a lawyer. Then she stumbled into an internship with The Chicago Defender doing actual reporting her senior year of high school at Hyde Park Academy. “When I found out that you can get paid for listening to people tell stories I was sold,” she says.
She went on to study Political Science at the University of Chicago, their lack of a Journalism school made her urge to be involved in the industry even more insatiable and she spent all down time in internships, writing freelance stories for the school newspaper, and helping out at the campus radio. She got her masters in Journalism at Columbia University in 1998, just missing the year they began offering a concentration in new media, which teaches communication through digital technology, which only included 8 students at first. She says, “It’s so funny, ever since I left journalism school it's been pretty much all new media for me even though I studied print journalism.”
Right out of Graduate School, she found herself to be a student again, along with everyone else. She wasn’t alone in this transition at the start of the millennium, all of the journalists in the world were adjusting to the changes brought on by the .com boom. This transition wasn’t hard for a person of her curious spirit, always willing to learn and follow the unknown as far as it led her. Her start in the workforce was exciting, with on the job training giving her a plethora of diverse new skills, such as video editing, web design, and scheduling she says,“You would learn all the skills you needed right then and there.”
Always being a pop culture fan she found herself working at an entertainment company, editing the site’s homepage with everything from reviews and commentaries to videos and photos. Despite still wanting to write, she made it work in order to gain diversity of skill, fitting in wherever she could. This website’s offices were in the same building of The Chicago Tribune and connections brought her in contact with someone with a similar job to the one she was currently working, who needed a replacement. Rockett scored an interview and landed the job. After 6 years working similarly to her last job, supervising the main website, she got promoted to a Life and Culture writer, which she's been doing for the last 4 years.
Work has been remote lately, which makes her schedule flexible. She starts early some days, works late others, depending on the schedules of the people she’s interviewing. At the beginning of each week she lets her editor know which stories are interesting to her, what she’ll be working on, and what to expect. All of her stories have a social justice goal. “I’m trying to tell the stories that need to be told from the communities that need to be heard from. If you want to have these conversations you have to get away from your desk and actually be a part of the community,” says Rockett.
Right now she’s interested in Public Art in Chicago, including artists such as Amanda Williams, who explores what the color black signifies and racial reckoning in her latest exhibit. Rockett is moved by art that attempts to bridge the gap between the generations. She likes to ask how we, as community members, can get better at that. These are the questions that challenge her on how to approach telling a story.
One of the most thrilling parts of her job, she says, is being able to ask these questions to actual history makers such as Reverend Jesse Jackson, exploring their points of view in a way that most people will never get a chance to. The only problem, she says, is to cover the incredible scope of what they’ve done without making it a book's worth of information.“You want to inform and engage but you also don’t want to put people to sleep, you want to inform the people that don’t know and entertain the ones that do,” she says.
She approaches her job with the same tenacity that she started it with, and looks at each story as an opportunity to inspire change. “The stories that deal with the juxtaposition of social justice, disability, community and how it all comes together to keep the conversation going about equity, agency and voice; these are the stories I like to tell. If you have an opportunity to be a storyteller in this world you have a responsibility to keep that conversation going. So I try to do as many stories like that as I can. If I can do that, I’ve done my job,” says Rockett.