Sometimes an event will get me to thinking about alternate paths, or different ways the present could have played out, or opportunities not taken. For instance, watching all the drama play out in South Carolina over the last week, and the work of a reporter or two in particular, got me thinking about what might have happened if I'd stuck with journalism and made a thing of it.
I backed into journalism, anyway. As best I can figure, it grew out of my love of history, and my love of the history of broadcasting. Read and see enough of Cronkite, Murrow, Brinkley and those guys and it rubs off, and I guess that's what happened to me. While my high school classmates were playing sports (or playing other things), I was working on the school paper. I did the same in college, too. Thing was, back then I was really enjoying it. There was a challenge in putting a piece together, tracking down the people I needed to talk to, and putting it all together by deadline. Within that hermetic atmosphere, most everybody there understood what we did and happily cooperated.
That changed a bit during my brief, unhappy stint as editor of a weekly real-world newspaper. It's a bit unfair to ascribe it all to the job; I ascribe most of my unhappiness during that period to the newspaper's owner/publisher (and de facto editor, for he insisted on keeping control of the things I was supposedly hired to help with). This was an old guy, almost deaf, who'd worked in the textile mills for most of his life and, I guess, saved every penny he'd ever earned. That's how he was able to start a newspaper. He was mad at the local daily paper, felt it was screwing the advertisers through its monopoly on newspaper advertising, and started his weekly as a way for the advertisers to have another venue. (He'd talk your ears off about it.) To him, editorial content was secondary. The big thing for him was having a low-cost or free paper with the maximum number of ads in it.
This guy had no use for any of the modern managerial practices, either. He'd pulled himself up by his bootstraps and was suspicious of anyone who hadn't come up the way he did. He had no use for anyone with a college degree; I suspected it was because we represented something that had been denied to him. He talked loudly, persuaded through intimidation and belittlement. Everybody was afraid of him. I mean, everybody. Except for one staff member who was his best buddy and slightly preachy, know-it-all right-hand man, we all cringed when he was around. It was interesting watching staffers who had worked for him for years and years: when he wasn't in the office, they'd laugh and joke and have fun. But the moment he came in, it was like they were all walking on eggshells. Nobody laughed, nobody did anything. It was exactly like the "Twilight Zone" episode where the kid would turn you into a giant jack-in-the-box or send you to the cornfield if you did anything that made him angry.
I think it was about then it started to sour. Oh, I enjoyed some of the work, and I met some really interesting people. But it was then that I really started to find that aspects of the job didn't suit me. The biggest problem is that I'm an incurable introvert, and I really hate asking other people for things. That's part and parcel of being a reporter: you have to call people up, sometimes when they don't want to talk to you, and ask them for interviews or information or material. Even then, you have to be careful about not misquoting them. Libel's a constant danger; the last thing you want is to be sued. And you have to be careful that you don't let yourself be used. Even then, if you report it straight down the middle, you run the risk of someone writing an angry letter accusing you of bias. (Even more of a risk in the Internet age, when any crank can hit the "comments" button and write comments that were once scrawled in crayon on onion-skin paper and dropped in a mailbox.)
Part of it, too, became that I wanted a career in which the hours would be fairly stable and predictable. I knew that getting into big-league reporting would mean losing that. I remember having to get up in the wee hours one morning to be in town so I could photograph a historic sign being dismantled downtown. I think it was that morning, as I was standing there waiting, I thought of my potential future: being awakened by a phone call at two in the morning to cover some crime story or accident that'd be shoved to the third page, not being able to count on a good night's sleep, having to be up at oh-stupid-thirty the next day to keep an appointment with some minor functionary about some project that wouldn't matter in the long run, having no social life because I'd have to stay late and cover tedious council meetings that night, and all of that. I thought about having to monitor police scanners, cover shootings and stabbings, talking to sobbing relatives of crime victims, having to view gory crime scenes. I thought about having to spend the rest of my life overcoming the knot in my stomach as I had to call people I didn't know, talk to them about things I didn't know much about, fretting about if I got it correct in the story, and having a bullseye painted on my behind for anyone with an axe to grind about the result. And I thought to myself, "Is this how I want to spend the next several years of my life?" I decided it wasn't.
I haven't abandoned journalism, not by any means. I still file the occasional feature piece here and there, when the opportunity comes and when I'm asked nicely, and I have a side gig doing some editing and consulting. It's a nice way to keep my hand in it a little bit, I guess, and it's on my terms. And, of course, the time I spent as a media professional (both in radio and in newspapering) was an absolute qualification for the job I now have.
If I'd had a more cooperative personality style and if my introversion wasn't so overpowering, maybe I'd have made a career of being a reporter. There are times I envy them, especially when a big story breaks. People laugh about the reporter's impulse to chase the police car or the fire engine, but I understand it. I understand the thrill that comes when a big story breaks, as a reporter digs and scratches to find something nobody else knows and scrambles to report it first. Part of me wishes I was doing that. Part of me looks at someone like Christiane Amanpour with awe and admiration and a little bit of envy, that had I played my cards differently I could be reporting on these big stories, traveling to exotic (and sometimes dangerous) places, doing my part to explain things to the folks at home and helping people understand, helping expose untold stories, holding people accountable for their actions, letting a little sunshine disinfect things.
But it wasn't meant to be. And though I am a little envious of reporters when they get to break open a big story, there's no question I dig what I do. In its own way, it brings thrills and occasional excitement and lets me use sunshine as a disinfectant, and life's given me plenty of adventures.
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