Tatiana Schlossberg was John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, and the child of one America’s most famous families. But in 2012, she was a rookie reporter at The Record in New Jersey. And I was her editor.
The Record had put her to work on an unglamorous beat covering a few towns in North Jersey. She caught a murder story, did an election preview and wrote about community fund-raising. There were the ins and outs of municipal budgets to be learned, as well as relationships to be developed with all the local politicians, municipal clerks and police chiefs.
“She was so shy and she really wanted people to just know her as herself,” her former colleague, Stephanie Akin, said on Tuesday. “She was covering one of those small, sleepy towns, and she called the police chief who got so excited that he asked her, ‘Is it true you are a Kennedy?’
“She got off the phone and burst into tears,” Ms. Akin said. “She wanted a chance to prove herself.”
Early on, I let Ms. Schlossberg know that I didn’t care all that much about her family history and that I would treat her like any other reporter under my watch. That suited her just fine. In fact, that was the type of experience she sought — even though her family name had gotten her the opportunity at The Record (better known as The Bergen Record).
“Typically, I would say that everybody has to prove their own worth,” recalled Martin Gottlieb, at the time the editor of The Record. “But it was Caroline Kennedy’s daughter. We created a new position for her. It was a very low salary, and she jumped at it.”
So began Ms. Schlossberg’s professional career as a journalist, one that took her from New Jersey to a stint at The New York Times and a career as an author and environmental journalist. Then, in an essay in The New Yorker in November, she disclosed her battle with cancer. She died Tuesday at the age of 35.
More than a decade before that, though, she worked out of the Record newsroom in an office park along Interstate 80 in West Paterson. Her first few stories were the typical fodder of young reporters at a local newspaper. She covered car crashes, funding for road improvements, a Revolutionary War re-enactment.
Then came Hurricane Sandy, which hit the Northeast at the end of October 2012, and brought with it a devastating storm surge that wiped out neighborhoods, flooded subway and train tunnels, and crippled the power grid across much of New Jersey and New York.
Like everyone on staff, Ms. Schlossberg was called into action. Since she lived in Manhattan, I asked her to write an article about how people in the city were coping with the disaster. She hit St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the shops along Fifth Avenue, a pizza shop and the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
But before she headed out, she called me with an unusual request: Would it be OK if her mother drove her around to get the interviews? I understood completely, because it was a parent caring for the well-being of her child.
Hurricane Sandy was a proving ground for Ms. Schlossberg, already a strong writer who used the experience to gain confidence in her reporting skills.
That confidence was evident when she stopped by my desk just a few days before Christmas that year and asked me to send her to Newtown, Conn. That’s where Sandy Hook Elementary School was and where 20 students and six staff members had been killed in a mass shooting on Dec. 14.
She wanted to cover some local police officers who where headed to Newtown to deliver Christmas gifts to families and a community that had lost so much. The result was a poignant article rooted in the selflessness of others during a time of tragedy.
She began her article by telling of the innocence that was ripped away when the shots were fired:
On his way to school last Friday morning, 6-year-old James Mattioli wanted to know if adults were allowed to go to Disneyland by themselves. His baby sitter and driver, Jess DiVanno, 23, told him “Of course.”
James’ reply: “I can’t wait until I’m an adult so I can go to Disneyland by myself.”
James was one of the children killed that day. For Ms. Schlossberg, I believe, going to Newtown was something more than just reporting. It was about showing up for people in need.
There were dozens of other articles she worked on for The Record in her 10 months as a reporter for the paper, but none rose to the level of the school shooting or the hurricane.
Over the years, she kept in touch with a number of colleagues at The Record. They would reminisce about what they covered and how the newspaper was the place they learned to be reporters and won accolades for their work.
For Ms. Schlossberg, that meant earning an award from the New Jersey Press Association as one of the best first-year journalists in the state in 2012.
There was an awards dinner the following spring that included journalists from all corners of the state, from weekly newspapers to dailies to magazines. It was held in a banquet hall along a highway somewhere in South Jersey.
Drinks were served. There was catering-hall chicken. And Ms. Kennedy, just as she had done in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, was there to support her daughter.
A few weeks after the dinner, Ms. Schlossberg handed me her resignation letter. It was a handwritten scrawl on a loose sheet of copy paper, dated April 15, 2013.
I still have it.
Rebecca Davis O’Brien contributed reporting.
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