Letters to a Young Journalist (1 of 2 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Letters to a Young Journalist by Samuel Freedman. Copyright 2006 by Samuel Freedman
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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DEDICATION To my mentors, Robert W. Stevens, Jim Podgers, Cissi Falligant, Jeff Schmalz, Arthur Gelb, Abe Rosenthal, Alice Mayhew

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INTRODUCTION
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Thirty years ago, when I was a good deal like you, I drove off to start my first job as a newspaper reporter. By that evening in May 1975, I had already been writing for student newspapers for nearly half my life, starting in junior high school. This summer internship on the Courier-News, a 45,000-circulation daily in suburban New Jersey, marked the first time I would actually be paid a salary for doing the thing I loved. In all the years since, I have tried never to forget the exhilaration I felt on that first night.

I was a few months short of nineteen then, and I didn't even own a white shirt or navy blazer for the occasion. If memory serves, I borrowed a leisure suit, of all things, from my father, and because he was three inches shorter than me, it couldn't have fit very well. My hair spilled down to my shoulders in coarse heaps, and I had the scraggly whiskers of a first beard, which I'd begun a few months earlier on a backpacking trip in Oregon. I must have looked like a complete buffoon.

Still, I had what was most essential to my calling, a ballpoint pen and a stenographer's notebook, and that equipment mattered more than my incompetent attire. I reached the Courier-News parking lot just before my shift, six thirty at night until two thirty in the morning. There was no pretense of training or orientation. I'd been hired because my clips from the college paper had convinced the editors I was capable, so I was dropped instantly into the pool of reporters covering local government. Whenever someone went on vacation, I filled in on the vacant beat. I can still remember that first night being sent to cover the township council in a place called Branchburg. I made my deadline and even slipped in the verb "assuage" in my lead paragraph, earning a sort of admiring snort from the night editor.

After I filed the story, I had my first real chance to survey the scene around me. The Courier-News occupied a low-slung modern building of white bricks and smoked windows, one that could have been easily mistaken for the insurance offices or furniture stores nearby on Route 22. Inside the newsroom, fluorescent lights cast a permanent daytime over banks of fake-wood desks and manual typewriters. The editors sat in a row at the front of the room with pots of rubber cement to glue together the pages of copy into a single, extended sheet for the back-shop. They also had a spike for the stories that were killed. Along the wall behind the editors clattered the wire-service machines. On the far side of two swinging doors lay the composing room and presses, which were manned by burly, ink-smeared printers who thought reporters were a bunch of wimps. Down a narrow hallway was our "cafeteria," which consisted of six or seven vending machines. One of them had microwavable pancakes.

Even on my first night, I knew enough about journalism to know this wasn't the mythological world of The Front Page. We weren't in a city. Nobody was wearing a fedora or sneaking booze from a desk drawer or shouting things like, "Gimme rewrite, babe." The Courier-News once had been such a place, a fixture in the downtown of Plainfield, New Jersey, a small city that made its modest way on paychecks from a Mack Truck factory. When the black section of town had burst into rioting in 1967, with a mob stomping to death a white cop, the Courier-News began plotting its departure for the suburbs.

The reporters whom I got to know over the coming weeks seemed drawn in equal parts from the past and the future. There was an old-timer named Forrest who liked to avoid being assigned obituaries by hiding under his desk. One of his contemporaries, Maggie, sometimes fell asleep at her desk, letting her wig slide off. Phil, one of the editors, chewed cigars. I couldn't dismiss the whole generation, though, because it also included Jack Gill, the streetwise skeptic who covered Plainfield, and Hollis Burke, an idealist who had done a midlife turn in the Peace Corps. They had about them not only experience but wisdom.

Naturally enough, I gravitated to the younger faction, the reporters and editors in their twenties, college-educated and ambitious. Ann Devroy, the city editor, would be smoking and eating patty-melt sandwiches as she pored over copy through her tinted aviator glasses. Sam Meddis, one of the investigative reporters, had talked his way into the paper with a bunch of poems he'd written as a Rutgers undergrad. Ultimately, Ann would become the White House correspondent for the Washington Post, Sam a feature writer for USA Today; others from that newsroom landed on the Baltimore Sun, Newsday, and The New York Times. That summer, though, such destinations felt impossibly distant.

It was sufficient, at least for me, to be making the lordly sum of $130 a week. I sat through a score of municipal meetings--borough council, board of education, zoning commission--and I called a half-dozen police departments for our daily roundup of local crime. Because I befriended the paper's drama critic, he let me review a few summer-stock productions. I reveled in being part of that community of reporters, sharing ziti dinners before we scattered to our various assignments, grabbing last call at the Ambers before we drove home. Those muggy Jersey nights never seemed more seductive.

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