I got into this business for two reasons, because of a love of writing and because I like to tell people’s stories.
It was about my senior year in high school when I suddenly took a love of writing. I had started writing poetry and it was my second year of writing for both the school yearbook and newspaper. My English teacher encouraged me to use my craft and, while I still dreamed of writing a novel someday, journalism seemed to be the best bet.
My first newspaper job would be more about covering public meetings than anything else. It seems I rarely
talked to people. Public officials and the people who attended their meetings made up most of my stories.
That would change when I worked for the Star, but not immediately. My first few years were heavy into covering meetings, partly because I started out as the county reporter. Police beat was a different beast, but still didn’t give me much of a chance to do the kind of stories I wanted to do.
Luckily there was enough opportunity to grab a few stories outside of my beat, to get out into the community and talk to people.
I also landed a few larger stories such as protests against a mega-farm accused of polluting the environment. People would invite me in, share how they swatted away flies during dinner and couldn’t even have an outside barbecue for fear of being invaded. I shared their stories with the readers.
A few years later I would land the lifestyles beat, then education. Both would let me write people’s stories, go into classrooms and into families’ homes and artists’ studios and everything in between to hear people’s stories and re-tell them.
I’ve had my share of happy stories, of joyful children and of doting parents. I’ve also had sad ones, like a woman who just lost her firefighting husband in an accident. There was a man who lost his brother in a race car crash, who started crying as he talked about it even though his own son was getting strapped in to race in another city.
I have also shared the stories of music and TV stars as well as aspiring local artists. There have been issues I educated the public about, crafting the story the best I could to keep both sides as equal as possible.
The best day is when I can capture the personality of the people I talk with, and perhaps some of the scene around them. While some days are a struggle, and others may make me yawn, it’s these days when I sit back at the end of the evening and think I made the right choice.
It was about my senior year in high school when I suddenly took a love of writing. I had started writing poetry and it was my second year of writing for both the school yearbook and newspaper. My English teacher encouraged me to use my craft and, while I still dreamed of writing a novel someday, journalism seemed to be the best bet.
My first newspaper job would be more about covering public meetings than anything else. It seems I rarely
talked to people. Public officials and the people who attended their meetings made up most of my stories.
That would change when I worked for the Star, but not immediately. My first few years were heavy into covering meetings, partly because I started out as the county reporter. Police beat was a different beast, but still didn’t give me much of a chance to do the kind of stories I wanted to do.
Luckily there was enough opportunity to grab a few stories outside of my beat, to get out into the community and talk to people.
I also landed a few larger stories such as protests against a mega-farm accused of polluting the environment. People would invite me in, share how they swatted away flies during dinner and couldn’t even have an outside barbecue for fear of being invaded. I shared their stories with the readers.
A few years later I would land the lifestyles beat, then education. Both would let me write people’s stories, go into classrooms and into families’ homes and artists’ studios and everything in between to hear people’s stories and re-tell them.
I’ve had my share of happy stories, of joyful children and of doting parents. I’ve also had sad ones, like a woman who just lost her firefighting husband in an accident. There was a man who lost his brother in a race car crash, who started crying as he talked about it even though his own son was getting strapped in to race in another city.
I have also shared the stories of music and TV stars as well as aspiring local artists. There have been issues I educated the public about, crafting the story the best I could to keep both sides as equal as possible.
The best day is when I can capture the personality of the people I talk with, and perhaps some of the scene around them. While some days are a struggle, and others may make me yawn, it’s these days when I sit back at the end of the evening and think I made the right choice.
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1 comments:
I write the blog Journalism Reports.blogspot.com among others and I write for my soul for writing does my soul a world of good. I write for Google but my requests to be paid falls on deaf ears but I write anyway and never received one dime and my blogs are still being published but sometimes I think I may be the world's most hated man. I cannot help what I was born but my blog progresses.
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