When I bought 'The New York Observer,' my experience in journalism was limited to a single article I had written for a college magazine.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There is no doubt that the way journalism worked when I was growing up and getting started has changed forever.
I grew up with 'The Denver Post' and the 'Golden Transcript.' There was never a moment that I thought I'd work at the 'New York Times.' My goal, starting out, was just to see if I could be a journalist.
I had sort of given up on conventional journalism. I found it far too restrictive.
It turned out I really didn't like journalism. I wanted to make up stories, not cover real events.
After I left high school and got my GED, I studied broadcast journalism for a year at a community college.
I did not read newspapers until I became a reporter.
I studied journalism at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. I did my graduate work at Emerson in Boston, and I was actually a reporter for a year in New York and New Jersey. It dawned on me that I wasn't cut out for that line of work. I mean... there's a certain thing that really good reports have that I just didn't.
Journalism is a craft that takes years to learn. It's like golf. You never get it right all the time. It's a game of fewer errors, better facts, and better reporting.
I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.
I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the 'New York Times,' when it had an edition in Paris, in 1963. I sold the paper in the streets by day and tore wire copy off the tele-printer for the editors making up the edition by night.