What got me started

I guess I have always been a wordie. Grams, my maternal grandma, often told me how when I was two, she flew up to Seattle to visit. On the drive home from the airport I constantly would grab her head, turning it so she could see the billboards and signs I was reading aloud. In junior high, I read Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur from covers to covers (two volumes). Dune was also on my junior high reading list. Shogun was my deployment read in Operation Desert Storm, as was literally anything else I could find. For all my childhood, the library was my favorite place to be. I loved conquering books, and I always have.

As for writing, that maybe took until I was in grade school before I started dabbling. A short story here, an essay there, most of which was done for school, but I still enjoyed it. It wasn’t until I was in the Army that I really started writing for myself. Letters, mostly, but I tried to be creative in my descriptions. Not much, and nothing I would even want to look back on with shame and embarrassment.

Then came college. As a freshman at Pasadena City College, I had an English professor who introduced me to reading for meaning, for detail, things that I had just skimmed over when I read for pleasure. Suddenly, books took on a whole new meaning. This was in the nascent days of the internet, so reading things online was limited to crappy websites and AOL message boards. Books continued to dominate my reading—newspapers and magazines cost money, something that was in short supply. It was also during this time I was introduced to broadcasting through a program called the Kaleidoscope Radio Magazine, a “pay to play” radio studio with a small network of stations. They started people off with a weekly 15-minute show, prerecorded, which was then played at random times and on random stations. The likelihood of ever hearing my own show was next to none. But it was fun, and within weeks, I was hooked.

After moving to Oregon and leaving my career in radio behind, I worked as a recording engineer while deciding what to do for school. I had wanted to go into psychology. I was always the one people came to when they had a problem they wanted to talk about. The University of Oregon had a great psych program, so that’s where I wanted to go. Meantime, knowing money would be an issue I decided to do some classes at the local community college. It was around this time that I took a job at KVAL, the local CBS affiliate and #1 station in the market, as part of the floor crew. Seems the broadcasting bug had not quite left, as I was taking classes in broadcasting, visual design, and production at Lane Community College. The main platform for the broadcasting program was a weekly campus-only newscast covering events in and around the campus.

News. Before I really realized it, I was working in news, studying the production of news, and getting involved in the process of newsgathering. It was like the red carpet was being rolled out for me to become a producer. I excelled at photography and video editing (ENG in newsspeak), writing came naturally for me, and the thrill (yes, thrill) of stacking a newscast had me firmly in its’ grasp. Fortunately, the U of O also had a top-ranked journalism program. So, as I studied, I worked my way up the ranks from production to the newsroom at KVAL. I started working full time shooting and editing video right around the time I finished at LCC and started full time as a pre-journalism major at Oregon. It was the combination of these two forces that showed me that journalism was my path, but that I wanted to remain behind the camera. Producing, then, was going to be my path. I kept a hand in photography and editing, but gradually I started producing newscasts both for the university and at KVAL. I entered a couple of contests for students to show off their video work, despite knowing I would be disqualified because technically I was a professional photographer, but what the hell.

Then I graduated. And for the next year, I filled in at KVAL for literally every newscast they had. I was assigned to the weekends but did a long stretch as the AM producer as well as a good amount of time as the late news producer. I learned from folks who had been at this game for years, propelling my ability to “write for the ear,” something I still do in most of my writing. I did two years at WISC, the CBS affiliate in Madison, Wisconsin (also the #1 station in the market). I left when my contract wasn’t renewed—I had a lot yet to learn, and making a leap from Eugene to Madison prevented me from learning it. I took a job in Savannah, Georgia at the lowest-rated ABC affiliate in the country. Literally 0.00 in the Nielsen ratings. It was two stations, WJCL and WTGS, the local Fox affiliate. Because I was coming from Madison, I was given the late news for both channels.

I mention this role specifically because the late newscast for any station is considered the “newscast of record” for the day. Where the morning news is light, airy, and fun, the late news is serious, no-nonsense journalism. Think Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Ted Koppel on their nightly national newscast, and you get the idea. Jab. Jab. Jab. Right cross, followed by an uppercut to the jaw. Body blow, body blow, cut to commercial. No matter the market, it was a cutthroat as you could get. And here I was, someone who had been doing weekend news for two years, now in charge of 90 minutes of news every night. Sure, the stories were basically the same, just rewritten for each station, but it was still a lot to handle. I both loved and hated it. I was spoiled. Being at #1 stations meant I had access to the latest equipment and a staff that spent years at one station. In Savannah, I had a largely transitional staff. Reporters came and went. Editors and photographers might have a spouse that was in the military, so they’d be leaving in a year or so. It was during this time that I got a taste of the responsibilities of news director. Michael Sullivan, the news director who hired me, was fired within a couple of weeks of my starting. He refused to accept that his “person on the street” style of journalism was not popular. “People love it,” he’d say. The ratings books said otherwise, and who do you think management listened to? Yeah. So, minus a news director, and with me running the newscasts of record, I shared the role of news director with the assignment manager who was at the station during the day. We had very different ideas. I wanted to go out and chase leads, do investigative journalism, kick some ass like I saw at KVAL and WISC. She wanted to fill 23 minutes of airtime and really didn’t give shit one about the quality of the material. She hated me and made no attempt to hide it. I expected my reporters to go out and report news, gather and follow leads, and build relationships with community and government leaders. If it were possible, she’d have been just find doing pet spay and neuter clinics and “person on the street” interviews at the gas station literally two blocks away. I lasted eight months before taking an early out from my contract and taking a position at KRQE/KASA in Albuquerque. I was back to doing weekends, but I was also at a #1 station again, and this time I was in a top-40 market. We even had our own news chopper and pilot! I was also back to cutthroat news gathering, dealing with fragile egos and a true attitude of “you know nothing, Jon Snow” towards anyone who hadn’t been in the ABQ for at least ten years. I loved and hated it. I loved most of the people I worked with, almost all of whom were not on camera. My weekend editor was an absolute gem, my other producers were (for the most part) great, and my production crew regularly bent over backwards to make whatever crazy shit I asked for happen. Our managing editor Paul was maybe the best of the bunch. He made me feel at home immediately, and always took care of anything I needed, that is when he wasn’t being pulled in 40 different directions or hanging out at the press club.

Then there were the egos. My news director apparently took great offense at the “whoa” of surprise I uttered when she completely changed her hairstyle—it wasn’t bad at all, but it was a complete 180 from how she looked the day before. One of the anchors wouldn’t even lower himself to speak to me unless it was to berate me to tell me to get out of his way. (Not even John “Karch” Karcher in Madison was this bad, and he strutted as though he had won seven silver stars in combat and taught Edward R. Murrow how to write!) The assignment manager had an ego almost as big as the anchors had despite being a buck-oh-five soaking wet with ears that could pick up satellite and a face so pinched he needed support beams to keep his eyes open.

To top it all off, about a year into my contract the news director brought on an assistant news director. I’ve blocked his name and face out of my mind to help preserve my sanity. This guy spent his days watching golf on television, playing golf on his computer, and making a single edit to a story so it showed that he worked on it last. I mean, he would take my stuff, change one word or add a space at the end of a paragraph, then take credit for my work while accusing me of not doing my job. He also had the ND’s ear, meaning she bought into the idea that I was the one fucking off while he slaved away writing the stories I was assigned. It got to the point that I had to print out everything I wrote and hand it over to the ND as a record of what I did. Other producers chimed in to support me, saying they had watched his “work” habits and made notes on his amazing online golf scores, but he could do no wrong. Despite overwhelming evidence and much testimonial support, my contract was cut short. I was okay with this, for a couple of reasons. One, I was extraordinarily unhappy in my given situation. Two, a multi-part sweeps week piece on a horrific child abuse case in Las Cruces made me realize news was no longer my calling. The idea of essentially profiting on the horrible abuse and death of a toddler made my discharge letter that much easier to take. This was in 2008.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Twenty-four years later, I still yell at the television when I see a mistake or notice stories that should be in a different order on the rundown. I’m hypercritical of reporters, grammatical errors are like spotlights, and crutch phrases like “it remains to be seen” make me want to throw a javelin through my television.

I do lament the mistakes of my past. I made a bad choice in career paths. Maybe I should’ve stayed a photographer. Or gone into newspaper reporting. Or magazine. Or, in a more realistic frame of mind, avoided anything that involved “hot house flower” egos like what I dealt with in journalism. I still love television news. I love the immediacy of it, the intimacy of it, the idea that I have 20 seconds to get across a message, I have one shot at it, and I better do it in a way that grabs your attention. I miss the ASMR wave that ran down my scalp every time I wrote a solid piece. I miss the chaos of the newsroom, the 15 minutes before air when everything goes to shit, and the feeling of relief when the newscast goes off without a hitch.

The best piece of advice I ever got as a writer was at KVAL when Jennifer Winters, a reporter/anchor at the station, advised me to start every story a though I’m talking to my mom over the dining table. “Hey, did you hear about this? The mayor just signed . . .” Omit the first sentence from the conversation, and there’s your lede. Another great piece of advice came in school when Michael Hopkinson taught a class on pronunciation and diction. He emphasized that no matter how a word is spelled, the pronunciation may be completely different. zun-EE’ vs. zun-EYE’, se-PUHL’-ve-dah vs. sepul-VEE’-dah, will-AH’-met vs. will-a-MET’. Karch taught me that a drinking fountain isn’t a drinking fountain, it’s a bubbler, and a stoplight is a stop-and-go light. Rich Edson showed me that it’s possible to jump from a 130 DMA to a national cable news channel, from Savannah city hall to Capitol Hill in one move. Brandi Smith taught me that no matter where you are and what role you do, you can always integrate your passion into your work.

I’ve been lucky to have been able to surround myself with some inspiring journalists. I wish I had taken a different road, but to be completely honest I don’t regret the choices I made. While my life might be a little easier now had I gone a different way, I wouldn’t have the memories of Audrey Seiler, the runaway bride, covering deployments, asking governors questions they really didn’t want to answer, and getting to watch firsthand as a missing child was found alive and well in a massive national forest.