Newspaperman-- Part I

I want you to know that you are not reading the column of some amateur.This is actually my fifth stint as a newspaper reporter.

My first endeavor was as editor in chief of my high school newspaper, The Oracle. This was a prestigious position for a four or six page glossy publication which published about once a month, depending on the amount of news since the last time and available time between homework and tests. It undoubtedly helped me get into a good college. There were 60 students in my graduating class.

In college I attained the rank of Features Editor and got a valuable card that had my name on it and in big bold letters the words "Working Press". To my delight, this card got me into events with other full-time working reporters and photographers. Two events stand out in my mind from working on my college paper-- one good and one bad. The good experience came from being able to interview the college president for hours. Normally, a busy and very distinguished person like that would have little time for a lowly undergraduate. But for an in- depth article which covered an entire page and dealt with his personal and professional life, I got an entire afternoon. The interview ended when all of my questions had been answered and following a house tour. It was a great experience for me, and he got a lovely article. I have always cherished the comments to me about it from one of my government professors -- a former Rhodes scholar and author of the definitive biography on Diderot-- that he knew the president very well, personally and professionally-- and that I had captured him very well. All of the foregoing remains in my mind not as a tribute to me, but rather an indication of the power of the press.

The second college experience seems amusing in retrospect, but did not seem so funny to me at the time. I thought I was a pretty good writer, but there was another classmate on the staff whose writing always blew me out of the water.I decided my "talent" wasn't as good as I thought. It was only years later, in introspect, that I came to realize that the staffer was none other than David Shipler, who went on to an outstanding career as a reporter for the New York Times, author of best selling books, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Then came my law school newspaper, to which I contributed articles occasionally. One article made a lasting impression on me. A group of us, who used to go jogging in the afternoon, decided to enter the Boston Marathon. I ran the marathon in a little under 4 hours and told everyone about it. Few people believed me until they saw an article about it in the school newspaper which included my name, whereupon everyone believed it and apologized to me for their error. What I didn't tell them was that I wrote the article for the paper at the editor's request but omitted my usual byline. This demonstrated to me how the power of seeing something in print influences people's belief in the truth of things.