In an ever-evolving media landscape, Mallory Carra, adjunct instructor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, constantly finds ways to adapt. As an adjunct faculty member, freelance journalist and podcast producer, Carra wears many professional hats.

Daily Trojan Magazine editor Miranda Huang sat down with Carra in late March to discuss her transition from journalism to the film industry, her observations on how these industries have changed at large and her advice to students at their own critical points of transformation.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DAILY TROJAN: This magazine is oriented around the theme of transformation… With so much upheaval in the world, politically, culturally or otherwise, we wanted to explore how our community changes and adapts to the times. But obviously, transformation occurs on an individual level too. So with that, I’m just curious, how did you find journalism and crack into that field and the film industry as well?

MALLORY CARRA: [My parents] have always been avid followers of the news. They subscribed to New York News Day, which was my very first exposure to news. … After a while, I started having questions like, “Why are some of the stories from the AP, and why are some of the stories by staff writers?”

I had no idea you could major in journalism. I didn’t know it was a thing you could do until I got to high school and I started writing for the paper. … I would write little stories here and there, and I didn’t think anyone would want to see them or listen to them. … I had often thought nobody really wanted to hear me talk. Why should I? There were so many other loud voices in the room. In high school, there were the class clowns, and then there were the kids that everyone deemed as “the smart ones.” So I really wanted to go to college and study the things I wanted to do.

Journalism helped me find my voice, and I just kept at it, even from that very young age. I kept writing for the paper. … And it just showed me that I wasn’t necessarily shy, I just needed a purpose to talk to people, and that really opened up my world because then I realized that I could be heard.

I was looking at the paper version of the application for New York University. I remember looking at journalism and film, and I said to myself, I don’t think I’ve lived enough to tell complex, made-up stories about life. I think I need to tell other people’s stories first. So I went [to school] for journalism first, and that’s what influenced me to major in it.

DT: I know from your bio that you have an MFA in screenwriting from USC. How did you end up getting to USC?

CARRA: I had graduated from NYU, and I knew for a fact that I was going to have to leave New York. … I got an internship at the Raleigh News & Observer, and then that made me very attractive to southern newspapers. And so then I wound up at the Chattanooga Times Free Press for two and a half years. My dream was always to make it back to New York, and I got to do that at age 24 when I was hired by the New York Daily News. But the year was 2008, right before Lehman Brothers fell. So not the greatest timing in the world. … That gig ended, and I wound up leaving. … I know it’s a cliché, but I had to find myself [in my 20s]. I wound up taking a temp job in the financial sector. I actually wound up getting laid off from that job as well that November. And I remember just going, “What the hell am I going to do next?”

I went to Iceland alone, and I wound up going to Egypt with my friends. The rest of that year was a real soul-searching year. I was back home. I was living at home. I was also taking care of my mom. … I remember I was in the car with my dad. We were probably going to Best Buy or something. And finally, I just said, “I don’t want to be in New York anymore. I don’t want to be here.” I had wanted so badly to be here, and I actually didn’t want to be here. I’ve seen the rest of the world. I’ve lived in North Carolina. I’ve lived in Tennessee. I had a car, and was never using the car in New York because you don’t use the car in New York. I think I’ve outgrown this.” Later that night, I Googled screenwriting programs because I thought, “Look, if the economy is going to fail, and I thought eventually I would become a screenwriter. … Why wait?” And also, what else am I doing? I’m applying for these jobs and these newspapers are collapsing. I may as well just do it. So I Googled screenwriting programs, I put in Los Angeles, and the three that popped up were USC, UCLA and [American Film Institute].

I just crossed my 20th anniversary of graduating from college last year, and also my 15th anniversary of getting accepted to USC. … [I like] to tell my students, especially when they feel lost, that, weirdly, the narrative threads of your life will make sense one day. It has taken me 20 years for them to make sense.

DT: In terms of the industries of film and journalism, how was the switch? Did it feel jarring to move from one to the other? Or did you find overlap between the two?

CARRA: I believe there’s overlap between the two. … In screenwriting, you’re taking a story and you have to do it within 10 to 20 pages. That’s a lot like journalism, where you only have a certain amount of words. They’re both very structured. … You have a time limit, a word count limit or a page limit, and you can’t go above it.

[However,] I do think they’re different. My professors at SCA always had to be like, “Mallory, you don’t have to stick to the truth. You’re inventing the world. … What does the sign outside say?” And I said, “Reality ends here.” He was like, “Mallory, this is your world. You make the rules.” So that was something I think it took at least a year for me to break out of, because in journalism, they stick hard to the facts.

DT: It feels like we’re headed for some uncharted territory with artificial intelligence’s integration of the workforce, both in film and Tilly Norwood but then also with journalism and AI and writing. So where do you see these industries headed with that?

CARRA: I think AI is constantly evolving …When Tilly Norwood came out, I was like, “Hold on, we have this whole new layer of things,” and now, Sora AI is closing down. It’s such a fast-moving machine that’s very hard to predict. Journalism and film need to harness it in a way that doesn’t hurt creators or writers. The main crux of AI is that it uses other peoples’ work.

When I was your age, there was this huge backlash against Wikipedia. “It’s using other people’s sources to be an encyclopedia. Oh, this is gonna ruin papers and everything like that. That was our AI.” This morning, Wikipedia came out and said “we’re not using AI.” It was wild for it to suddenly go from being the villain to the hero. I think AI is just going to have to do what Wikipedia did — find its guardrails.

DT: What’s advice you’d give to students who are at this critical junction in their lives?

CARRA: Go out and live. … You do not have much you can write about if you don’t go out and live, right? If you don’t go out and see things. A lot of my students were like, “Why do you always have these pitches and stuff?”, and it’s because I go out and live. That’s the best advice I can have for any USC students: go out, experience Los Angeles in a very safe and prudent way. And, you know, experience the culture, experience the places you’re in, because it’s only going to help you generate ideas for pitches — see what’s out there.

DT: What does transformation mean to you on an individual level, and what is the biggest way you’ve changed in your time in the various workforces you’ve been in?

CARRA: You have to let yourself change and transform these days, because if you don’t, you’re going to be left behind. … Sometimes you’re transforming out of necessity. Sometimes you’re transforming because it’s the path that you want to take for your heart. But I think you just have to be open to all of those things and even recognize it in yourself, which can actually be sometimes really hard. Having that happen really taught me that you have to keep changing, and you have to allow yourself a lot of flexibility … You better evolve with the times.