Chicago, with its big newspapers and major broadcasting stations, couldn't have been a better city to start a journalism career.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's a tough town, it's a loving town, it's a supportive town, and that's why so many great news people, journalists have come through Chicago or are from Chicago.
Chicago seems a big city instead of merely a large place.
Because Chicago was to radio what Hollywood was to films and Broadway was to the theatre: it was the hub of radio.
I must say that it's easy to write nice things about Chicago because it's that kind of town.
When I left Toronto and entered journalism in the late 1990s, I had many notions about the news business, nearly all of them wrong, as it turned out.
In the '50s and '60s, journalism wasn't a profession. It wasn't something you went to college for - it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working in newspapers at the copy desk, or delivery boys, and then they would somehow become reporters afterward and learn on the job.
I was a newspaper editor in high school, and I truly thought of journalism as a career. I loved it.
My own career started in New York at the 'Associated Press', a fast-paced news agency where we rarely had time for deep reporting.
There is no doubt that the way journalism worked when I was growing up and getting started has changed forever.
Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.