I’ve slogged away in many newsrooms over the years but the very first one I ever worked in was at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, where, in the early 1980s, students published a plucky little weekly paper punningly titled the Parkside Ranger. It was there that I met Rick Luehr. Rick was a gangly and bespectacled young man who would have been quite tall had he not had a perpetual stoop, this due to the fact that he had lost the use of his legs at a young age and was left to make his way through the world on crutches or, later, a wheelchair. The reasons for his infirmities involved a complex and troubled medical history, but the larger point is that Rick never spent much time dwelling on his problems, so I never really knew nor cared why he was what people used to crudely call crippled, because Rick was not a disabled person to me but a buddy and a good one.
Getting Personal
Teaching Journalism in Tumultuous Times
A professor from another college recently sought my advice about how to rejuvenate his school’s journalism program. He asked me two questions, one easy, the other not so much.
Remembering Pete Hamill, Through His Writing
The one and only time I worked with an honest-to-god legend in my career as an ink-stained wretch was when, for a brief period in the 1990s, Pete Hamill was editor in chief of the New York Daily News, and I was an editor on the national desk. I didn’t interact with Pete much; he was, understandably, primarily focused on coverage of the city, the tabloid’s raison d’etre. I do recall coming in late to work one morning at the paper’s old West 33rd Street headquarters. Speed-walking down the corridor lined with famous Daily News front pages, I suddenly found Pete next to me, headed in the same direction. We chatted for a minute or so about this and that – in addition to his myriad achievements Pete was a genuinely nice guy – then went our separate ways as we entered the football field-sized newsroom. I practically levitated the rest of the way to my desk.
On a Drive Across Pennsylvania, Seeing a Student Take Flight
The other day, I went on a road trip. Not too far, just a couple of hours across a stretch of the vast east-west expanse we call Pennsylvania, a journey from the burbs north of Philly to Hershey, where my students, journalism majors at Bucks County Community College, would attend a luncheon to receive the awards they’d won, in a statewide competition, for their work on the college newspaper. On the drive, I got a chance to catch up with a student I hadn’t seen in a few months, one who had transferred recently to Temple University.
All About Journalism 