I think the first time I knew I was interested in journalism was when my math SAT scores came back, and they were so low that I had no other choice  (laughs) but to be interested in something that was verbal, but I guess my senior year of high school I knew I wanted to be a journalist, took my first journalism class, was pretty good at that, and more important, loved it and applied to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, was accepted there and knew that was it for me, walked to the school newspaper’s offices at the Daily Northwestern and said, “I want to write,” and they said, “Ok,” and there was sort of a marriage that day. And that’s, that’s really been it, and then sports entered in, and I wanted to stay close to my other passion – maybe even my first passion -- which is sports, and I sort of combined the two elements.  I knew that, if I was going to write expertly about something or at least seemingly, it would need to be involving sports.  And, because I think that, if you are passionate about something, you are going to be much better at it.  You are going to work hours at it, but it’s not going to seem like work.  You are going to spend time doing it and developing the finer points of something, but the passion will prevent you from looking at the clock or prevent you from feeling bad because you’ve missed a friend’s birthday party or that you’ve missed Thanksgiving dinner or had to leave early because all those things happen.  It’s a career in which stuff happens, and it doesn’t happen on anybody’s watch or anybody’s calendar.  It doesn’t observe holidays.  It doesn’t observe 5 pm quitting time, and you have to be willing – and more than that, you have to be excited about staying longer and working and putting in extra time and making an extra phone call, and you’ll do all those things if you love it. 

2. Internship/Work History

Other than writing for the Daily Northwestern, which so many students start with the daily newspaper at their schools, I had an internship in Lafayette, Indiana, at the Lafayette Journal and Courier, which was part of Northwestern University’s teaching newspaper program.  You go there for a semester; I was there for 10 weeks, covered cops and courts and the weather and what was going on, whatever it was in Lafayette, Indiana, and I bugged the sports editor to let me to go out and write some basketball sidebars when Perdue University’s men’s basketball team was playing that winter, and it was a very good team.  And those clips I used to get my internship at The Washington Post, and the summer I spent at the Post which was only four or five months after my winter in Lafayette, Indiana, the summer internship clips from The Washington Post, I used to get job offers at the Miami Herald and the Chicago Sun Times, but The Washington Post offered me a full-time job coming back as a General Assignments sports reporter, and that is how I got my start literally. 

     My start in the broadcast side of journalism didn’t come until later when, because I worked -- covered so many beats and so many sort of high profile things for the Post, I was asked to contribute, to come work as a contributor for ESPN and for Channel Four, for WRC, the NBC affiliate in Washington.  So that start was a lot longer in coming and actually a little more complicated than my start on the print side which I consider myself a newspaper man first and foremost.

3.  Differences among Kinds of Journalism/Communication Fields

The writing is different.  You have to write a lot tighter – you have to write -- to be more concise writing for broadcast.  Words that writers who write for print love to use, long four-syllable words, you need to get rid of.  Those long flowing sentences with commas and semicolons and weird construction, sentences that you could never diagram on paper if you were in grade school – those sentences should not be used in television and on radio.  They can save them for the Internet now.  But, uh, so the writing is different, but it’s still writing, and there’s still nothing like mastering the language.  And, if you’ve mastered the language, then you can change on the fly.  It’s not that difficult when a news editor in television says, “Hey, you got to tighten this up,” versus maybe a print editor who wants you to expand on something and wants those sentences to be more lyrical.  But I think that that one skill – writing – and I really should combine them – reading and writing – is the thing that can carry you through regardless of what you want to do – whether you want to be in public relations, whether you want to be in advertising; it’s all story telling and using the language to get across a point. 

4. What it Takes to Create a Good Story

I think really trying to figure out your audience and trying to give the audience what it needs.  If you are writing a sports story you’re writing for a slightly different audience than if writing for the style section, to use my own newspaper, The Washington Post.  If you are writing for Mechanics Illustrated, you’re writing for a different audience, and, if you are writing for Glamour Magazine. And figuring out the audience and what the reader or viewer wants to know, needs to know--those are still the most difficult things and still the most basic things – how to give a reader or viewer what he or she needs in a concise, accurate presentation.  And, most of the time should be put into the reporting aspect, not the writing aspect, although the writing demands attention.  We all like to write and craft words and try things and playing with words, and that’s a real fun part – except on deadline perhaps – but the research is what should be there: the talking to sources, the bouncing your ideas off editors, and maybe other people that you trust, and digging and finding out information – those things cannot be overrated because ultimately that’s what’s going to separate you from someone who doesn’t have the information who may be very glib, but the substance isn’t there.  There are certain people that I love to read because I know that person is going to tell me something I don’t know.  There are other people I want to read because they are very glib, and they’re very entertaining.  The best, the best people in this business are people who can tell the story that provides you with new information and tell it in a way that’s entertaining.  Most people can’t do both, but if I was going to have to be one or the other, I think the person who can tell you something you didn’t know when you picked up the paper or turned to that channel or logged on to that website, that’s the person who is always going to be able to find a job because they can bring information to you, to a discussion.

5.  The AP Style Manual and Test

Manuals like that [AP Stylebook] are very important early on because there’s a certain stylistic conformity that we all need to be familiar with even if we don’t want observe it later.  I probably violate half of the rules of thumb in the AP Stylebook now, but as a 21-year-old journalist, I better not have violated any of them.  And it’s something . . . it’s like Strunk and White--You can be familiar, there are certain bibles, if you will, for journalists, and you need to know them before you violate any of them, if you ever do.  And just knowing the rules really makes you feel more comfortable and confident that you can write.

6. Trends, Conditions, Realities: Past, Present, Future

The Internet Influence:  Infoedutainment and the Integration of Media

The future of journalism is fascinating right now because, as we start to see the decline, really, of the daily newspaper, we are seeing the rise, I mean just a meteoric rise, of the Internet, and everything is being put on the Internet.  So while newspapers are in decline, a newspaper like The Washington Post, which will never really go into steep decline, will always be around.  The Washington Post has started an afternoon edition on the website – on The Washington’s Post’s website – and so we are seeing really an integrated sense of media that no one could’ve predicted years ago where radio is involved with the Internet.  You are broadcasting essentially.  I do a broadcast for an hour a day on the Internet.  Pretty soon, Internet and radio -- I’m not sure where the lines will be drawn – maybe there won’t be lines.  Maybe it’ll blend in such a way . . . .  Same thing with newspapers, as advertisers figure out how to grow revenue from newspapers and magazines being on line.  So it’s a fascinating time.   There are more people than ever who want to be in journalism.  Fortunately, there are more outlets than ever for expressing oneself.  Whether it be through the conventional means that we think of – newspaper and television — or these new media approaches.

7.  Deaf People in Journalism:  Barriers and Opportunities