When I Was a Reporter

Reporting was my first career, and the one I trained for. I worked as a journalist for four and a half years, dashing around town gathering notes, for most of the week, by car and by foot, then concentrating myself into a desk chair and hammering out stories, mostly in the final day and night before press day. It was exhausting, but exciting, and at times felt glamorous.

I worked evenings and weekends chasing stories, attending meetings, rushing from one event to another, almost always with a camera hanging from my neck and a paper cup of coffee in one hand. I conducted interviews in offices, in meeting rooms,on the street, trading jokes and compliments, asking easy questions and hard ones, enjoying camaraderie, managing relationships, wearing out my car, going through lots of shoes and lots of notebooks and pens. I mind-melded with my typewriter or Macintosh Plus, blocking out the noise and rush of a busy newsroom, extracting sentences from a quiet, personal place in my guts. When paste-up time arrived, I hustled among my co-workers, firing off poor to half-good jokes and taking hits of the same as we all stood before easels with t-squares, cutting and placing and rolling-down strips of copy and photography backed with hot wax.

At my Missouri newspaper, the climax of it all was to head downstairs to the pressroom to hand deliver my final “boards” to the press guys. Almost invariably, my pages were the last ones done, because I’d kept writing past the copy deadline. I’d watch as those high-speed wizards—cigarettes stuck to bottom lips, eyes squinting for laser precision – I’d watch as they placed the photo negs, cut the rubies, shot the plates, and, finally, as they stood astride machinery, expertly inserted the metal page-plates onto rollers in the gargantuan press. Then someone would flip a switch, and that convoluted freight train of a machine would begin its faster and faster rolling. Two of us reporters and two or three press guys would each snatch a fresh-milled newspaper from the exit rollers and flip through it with scrutinizing eyes, looking for mistakes. Sometimes there’d be something to fix. Most of the time the paper was perfect. Or perfect enough for newspaper work.

I’d wish the team farewell and head home, exquisitely exhausted in body and mind—I would have been writing until three or four the previous night and then again from 8:30 on. At The Washington Missourian, Tuesday and Wednesday were a single long day with three or fours hours of sleep. Walking out of the newspaper building after we’d put the paper to bed, no matter what weather I was stepping into, felt like (let me exaggerate) stepping back into society at the end of a war. You’d done your duty. You’d done it well.  You’d still be soaking in satisfaction over one or two of the stories you’d just contributed to history. You’d feel like a hero. An unsung one, but as real a hero as someone saving who’s just been fighting a fire, or stopping a runaway train, or rescuing people trapped in the mountains.

I don’t think I’d ever do it again. It was just too hard. A young man’s game. But I’m proud that I did it. Proud of how I did it. Let me talk about that.

*

I was a very hard-working journalist. I held myself to high standards—of accuracy, of completeness, of writing style. I believe this came largely from the standards my father and older brother held me to in my junior high and high school years, working in the family business, doing a good job because a bad job could undermine the family’s financial survival. I think it also came from a keen dislike of criticism—I avoided it as much I could by being very self-critical, making as close to zero mistakes as I could. It was neurosis as much as virtue. And it also came from a love of doing things well if I did them at all. I think that part was inborn and far more useful than burdensome.

I won two journalism awards, and at both newspapers I was given editor responsibilities almost out of the gate. People in the community thanked me specifically and often for the quality, integrity, and amount of my reporting. I got promoted at both newspapers to higher responsibility. My first boss wrote me a very glowing letter of recommendation. I always felt I had the respect of my colleagues. I didn’t get much open praise from them as I would have liked, but I chalk that up to most people not being complimenters. I threw myself full-strength into my reporting and did good work. Sometimes I want to say “exceptionally good work,” and sometimes manage not to.

Let me give some detail on that note. I believe I wrote with a high degree of reporting skill and did so in a prose style that stands out, most of the time, for clarity and freshness. In most of my stories I aimed to tell as complete a story as I could without becoming, or at least without seeming to become, too long-winded. And I almost always managed to bring into a straight-news story some elements of human interest, a suggestion of broader implications, or irony. I got a lot of good quotes (which took extra time and effort). I usually included context (historical or explanatory), which made the stories more understandable at the time, and give them a longer shelf life. I think anyone who likes colorful and fresh writing, or authentic detail about the times and places I covered, will find them in these stories.

Some of the stories amount almost to literature, in my opinion. They read as news of the human condition, not news of some particular week in some particular town. 

I think I’m done bragging now. Or at least for the time being.

*

Reporting was a great experience for me. My intended career from my freshman year in high school onward was to be a fiction writer. I knew that Hemingway and others had arrived at fiction-writing careers by way of journalism. So I took journalism classes in high school and college. My college degree was a combination of Creative Writing and Journalism. When I graduated college, I wrote movie reviews for a year (while supporting myself as a substitute teacher). A year after graduation, in 1983, the opportunity came my way to be a reporter at my hometown newspaper, a twice-weekly called The Washington Missourian—a very lucky accident. I auditioned for and got that job. And for the next three and a half years I worked 60+ hour weeks as a straight news reporter covering the city of Union, Missouri. As time permitted I also wrote feature stories.

In late 1967, I moved to Brooklyn, NY, and again had the lucky accident of  a newspaper job coming open right where I lived. I took a job as reporter for The Canarsie Courier, a small weekly in a small “section” (basically a town) at the far eastern edge of Canarsie, Brooklyn. I worked there for one year on a part-time basis—about 30 hours a week, leaving me the rest of the week for fiction writing.

There are three main reasons I say these years of hard, low-paying work were great for me. First is that reporting gave me front-row access to the working and doings of two very different communities. In Union, I got to see up close how aldermen and school board members and police and business organizations and water and sewer departments and street departments—and vocal citizens—how these all functioned together to keep a small town both going and growing. I got to see squabbles and finagling and funny business and persistent well-meaning efforts and very dedicated, talented professionals and legal machinations and bond issues and elections—got to see all those municipal cogs and levers in action and up close. I got to satisfy my curiosity by going right up to people, right into offices, right up police officers, and asking questions. In Canarsie, I got more of the above, but the focus of my reporting became crime stories and feature stories. This put me face-to-face with the local color—a lot that was sordid, a lot that was sad, a lot that was charming. My Canarsie year was almost a time of gathering notes for future fiction—and I got paid for it.

The second reason reporting was such a great first career for me is that I got the chance to practice writing on someone else’s dime. Like my literary hero Ernest Hemingway, I honed my writing at the grindstone (i.e. a typewriter or Macintosh Plus) of daily composition. I ground off my tendency to write in high falutin’ ways. I ground off my overuse of the passive voice, and adverbs, and saying things roundabout and vaguely. I learned to always write with my tongue moving, feeling for rough spots and smooth spots in the word flow, for rhythms that worked against or for my meanings. No matter how many stories I’d written, each new one was an uphill challenge. I would have the feeling, “Can I solve this story? It shouldn’t be so hard! I should be faster by now! I wish today were over!” I would poke and growl around that story like a dog inspecting something new in the house—it might be formidable, it might be a toy. I’d finally find my lead paragraph, the key to everything else, and off I’d go. But all the way down the story I’d be following (and discovering) rules or instincts for how to best tell this particular story. I would work as intently, as unforgivingly, on every news article, big or small, beginning to end, as I’d ever worked at fiction. And in the process developed what I call my gut for writing. It’s a combination of techniques I can easily articulate, and ones I hardly know I’m using. I think in my roughly 54 months of reporting I must put in the 10,000 hours Malcom Gladwell talks about for attaining high proficiency.

The third reason is that I enjoyed reporting as much as I’ve enjoyed any of my jobs. What a grand, blood-stirring way to spend four-plus years of my young adult life. Working alongside teams of people, week in and week out, to produce something creative and professional. Learning to introduce myself to anyone with confidence and zest. Learning to frame my questions clearly and inescapably. Accruing the the ability to draw out people’s best thoughts and best words. The adventure of working long days to meet my own standards and expectations, no one else’s. I see myself making my reporter rounds—to city hall, to the ambulance building, to the school district office, to the police station—with a fast stride, a notebook, a camera hanging from my neck, and a cup of coffee. I see myself dashing from my car to cross a construction site for a photo, the camera now swinging before me like a sped-up pendulum—hurry, Tom! Before the sun goes behind that cloud! Before the workmen see you and stop that photogenic pointing and laughing! Before you’re late for your next appointment! I see myself still typing at midnight on the night before publication, almost totally shot, still drinking coffee—and my fellow reporter coming in to chat, and we sit there chewing the fat for two hours instead of writing, but then go back to work—another two hours of writing, yet. Finally, at three or four in the morning, walking home through the empty downtown, feeling air of just the right temperature, under streetlights of just the right brightness, practically buzzing with the satisfaction of the stories I’d written, as if I’d done something fit for Scribner’s and Sons,  publishers of my favorite Hemingway volumes. I call that walk home at night an adventure. I call sitting in a windowless basement auditorium full of aldermen and other city officials an adventure—the city’s business laced with jokes and teasing, the reporter from the rival newspaper beside me, each of us nursing a tall coffee, each asking one another, “What’d he just say? How do you spell that name? Ordinance number what?” I call slogging through bad weather, by foot and by car, and coming back to the news office to see the others of that busy hive bustling about at their machines, and fetching yet another coffee from downstairs where the pressmen worked, and settling into my desk chair before my typewriter once again, my hands poised like a pianist before he begins another composition—I call all those things adventure. Reporting gave me a countless number of them. When I read the stories in this book, I’m thinking of all that. If others enjoy this book one tenth as much as I do, I’ll have happy readers. Each chapter is a recording of a concert I typed one time in the newsroom: “the story of some people/in a little town today/creating regulations/to keep bad things at bay…buh-buh-buh-boom!”