Molly Given–In it for love

At 28 years old, Molly Given carries herself with remarkable maturity, energy and humility. But having interviewed as many people as Molly has, it’s unsurprising that she’s picked up some wisdom along the way.

Mainstream media often portrays journalists as quiet or intrusive, sneaky or openly berating. But Molly, despite wearing a black turtleneck and speaking with a slight southern accent, is none of those things. She is present, personable, and passionate.

Becoming a journalist was largely an accident, but Molly’s love for writing began during childhood. Whether she was writing in childhood notebooks, studying media, or moving to Los Angeles to pursue screenwriting, passion pushed her pursuits.

“I always knew I wanted to write, it was just in what capacity,” she says.

The west coast provided valuable opportunities, but she knew it wasn’t the right place for her.

“I was very small fish in a very big pond,” she says. “There, everyone it seems is trying to make it in that industry.”

Philadelphia was a new world of opportunity. After writing horoscopes, then copy writing for a theater company, she became a features writer at Metro US. But that position became much more.

She humbly describes her start in entertainment reporting as “luck” that followed company layoffs.

“Some people in New York just started reaching out to me, I just said ‘yes’ and it went from there,” she says.

When the pandemic took root in the United States about two years later, she maintained her hard-earned connections with publicists and industry professionals with the same word: “yes.” Her work ethic didn’t falter, and she amplified even more positive messages.

“I’m always trying to be a herald of someone who’s positive. I was like that before,” she says. But when the pandemic brought people added grief, the trend in stories began to shift. Molly’s had even more outlets for her passion.

“This is the first time in a long time that we’ve all gone through something,” she says, her voice full of emotion. “There was a sense of loss for everyone, some bigger than others, but that, again, has I think driven everyone to want to connect to, I think, have more empathy for people.”

Molly puts her hand over her heart as she says the last phrase.

While her compassion is noteworthy, her self-awareness of what makes her stand out is even more so. She’s transparent and generous about her personal success strategies, letting the interview double as an advice session for other young journalists.

Smiling over Zoom, she says the key to avoiding being one of the many is to “find something that makes you stand out, that you’re passionate about.” “Eventually people catch on to that passion.”

It’s clear how she achieved so much, so soon – the combination of her unabashed passion, kindness, and confidence make the perfect recipe for a journalist. She seems able to talk for hours about her experiences, held back by the instinct to keep responses concise.

She manages to describe her “most eye-opening day” in just two minutes.

It involved a visit to the Penn Museum to write a piece about their Global Guide program, where locals from around the world were invited to give tours in exhibits about their homes. She expected to ask general questions about their experiences as tour guides. But the guides were so excited to share details about their homes that she spent the whole day with them.

“I wanted to get everything they said in there,” she says. The finished article was 2000 words long.

“It was just something that, again, opened my eyes to a lot and I kind of gained, not just people I talked to for a story, but friends, even,” she said.

In the true spirit of friendship, each of them still reach out to her, whether that’s to wish her a Merry Christmas or to like her social media posts.

But, even if Molly hadn’t connected with the tour guides as she did that day, the conversation and article likely would’ve been similar because she always focuses on the positives in her work, refusing to critique.

“I always try to find people’s passions, because I think we’re all passionate about something,” she says. She believes that everyone can agree on passion and creativity.

After the interview, her next destination is Philidelphia’s Franklin Institute. The museum sent her a cryptic invitation to a press conference regarding an upcoming Harry Potter exhibit. She doesn’t know much, but she was intrigued.

Despite a busy day packed with that event, article-writing and conducting interviews of her own, she still made time to speak with a class of undergraduate journalism students.

That alone tells you everything that you need to know about Molly Given, the unconventional journalist.