My story.
When I happened across the yellowed newspaper in storage at my parents’ home a few years back, I was astounded by the date on the cover.
April 18, 1977. The day I was born.
The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky.
The newspaper where I would work for nearly six years.
In a funny way, it seemed like my destiny was confirmed. My parents had set aside that paper as the memory of my birthday, left it in storage after two moves and never told me about it. I wouldn’t see it until adulthood. And they apparently didn’t save any papers for any of my eight siblings, all younger.
By that time, I was already a rookie journalist. The news bug bit me much sooner. It was a love of news, not strictly newspapers, that has defined my career.
I can trace it back to at least sixth grade at St. Pius grade school in Louisville. In a few lucky occasions, social studies class would be transformed into a current events quiz, game-show style. Each participating student had a rudimentary buzzer to slam when they knew the answer to the teacher’s questions.
I found that I did. I liked to watch the evening news.
In seventh grade, there was a new type of current events quiz. The buzzers were gone, and it was just student and teacher, one on one. But this time, my teacher selected me to put together a summary of important world events for the rest of the class to study.
I hand-wrote a synthesis of the network news on one sheet of paper and my teacher made copies for the whole class.
It wasn’t long until I was making my own newspaper with hand-drawn illustrations and stories hammered out on an electric typewriter. My brother Brian did the comics. One of the big news stories was addition of a new family cat, Timothy. I was in business.
Ever since I started writing my own “books” at about age 5, I had always tried to hawk them for a nickel or a dime. They even had their own house ads.
Like most kids, I dreamed about different careers. I enjoyed watching birds and thought I might become an ornithologist. I was fascinated with maps and the way Interstate highways covered the nation, and thought I might be a cartographer.
Somewhere between grade school and the middle of high school, I decided I wanted to be a newspaper journalist. I can credit my parents for, as far back as I can remember, keeping a Sunday subscription to The Courier-Journal.
Perhaps I started reading the paper, not a common activity for children, as an antidote to Sunday boredom. My dad was the sole breadwinner, working sometimes six days a week as an electrician at the Phillip Morris cigarette plant in Louisville. Sunday was the only day he would reliably have off. So he liked to stick around the house and spend the day with his family.
That left me a lot of time to spend with the Sunday paper. I started off just reading the comics, but then I fell in love with the news. Simply put, I loved being the first to know what was happening. I would regularly take a breather from my schoolwork to hear the radio news on the hour, my sole medium for breaking news. I had no idea how much that would change.
In my senior year of high school, I finally got to shadow a real, live, working journalist. Jack Brammer, Frankfort bureau chief for the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, graciously showed me a day at the Kentucky state capitol.
By then, I was sold on newspaper journalism. I entered the journalism program at Western Kentucky University, and before classes began, I was filling out an application to work for the student newspaper.
After three months of hard work, I got noticed and my first newspaper story ran on the front page, a color piece about Election Day 1996.
Now it was time to work for a real newspaper. My professors at Western were adamant from the start of college that internships were the key to a newspaper career. I accepted an internship my freshman year writing for the Evansville (Ind.) Courier, a paper of about 65,000 daily circulation.
It wasn’t purely a news job. I wrote for a quasi-marketing publication called Progress, extolling the virtues of growth in small towns in southwestern Indiana, Southeastern Illinois and western Kentucky. My task was to write about growth, development and tourism in these towns for a once-yearly supplement that would be tucked inside the newspaper.
But it gave me a chance to prove I could write. I traveled from small town to smaller town, meeting government and business leaders and getting to know a lot of backroads.
It was a great experience that led me to my next summer gig at the Courier's afternoon competition, The Evansville (Ind.) Press. The Press was a scrappy, failing afternoon newspaper about to succumb to changing reader habits, but not until the end of its Joint Operating Agreement with the morning Courier on Dec. 31, 1998. That meant it had one summer of life left in it.
I was there, covering everything – cops, City Hall, general assignment – as more reporters left for stable jobs. That’s why the editors sent a guy who just finished his sophomore year in college to cover a triple-murder homicide an hour and two counties away.
I wrote two second-day stories about the tragedy, which won first place in the spot news category of the Hearst Journalism Awards, which is considered the Pulitzer of college journalism. The Hearst Foundation shipped me out to San Francisco to compete against a handful of other college journalists in a writing competition. I was a finalist, but didn’t place in the competition.
That had to wait until the following year. I earned the right to return to San Francisco for the best editorial in the collegiate world, “Hush Money.” As opinion editor at Western’s student paper, I penned an editorial condemning the university’s practice of paying cash settlements to employees accused of sexual harassment.
I placed second overall nationally in the Hearst competition.
My third internship, at the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, took me the farthest from home. I was most proud of my portrait of the demise of a historic preservation organization that sank into bankruptcy.
I returned to Kentucky for my fourth and final internship at the second-largest paper in the state, the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader. That summer, I examined the state’s arcane alcohol control laws that permit alcohol sales in some counties but allow others to ban it decades after national prohibition ended.
After climbing the student newspaper ranks, from reporter, to opinion editor, to news editor, to feature columnist, to assistant features editor, I graduated in 2000.
I pondered traveling with my journalism skills, particularly to the west coast that I first discovered in San Francisco. But my first job offer out of college came from my hometown paper, the paper I grew up reading.
The Courier-Journal.
I couldn’t pass it up. I worked the night cops/general assignment beat for my first year at the C-J. I chased fires, shootings and hostage situations. I profiled a native Kentuckian who died in one of the jetliners on 9/11, the top local story on 9/12.
After a year on the night beat, I moved to days and the biggest beat on the paper’s suburban desk, covering Eastern Jefferson County. This was the land of the rich and richer, the province of both old-money mansions and hard-charging suburban sprawl. I covered City Councils in the suburban cities of Jeffersontown, Middletown, Anchorage and Prospect, earning an appreciation for small-town civics and following the money in municipal budgets.
My work earned me a promotion to the Courier’s southern Indiana bureau, across the Ohio River from Louisville in nearby Clarksville. I covered the city of New Albany and Floyd County, Ind. I even had my own office. But I still felt that itch to travel with my journalism degree. I was almost 30. Either I put down roots in Kentucky, as nearly everyone in my extended family has, or make a break for it.
I chose the latter. I had fallen in love with the Northwest during an impromptu, weeklong trip to Portland in 2005. I loved hiking in the mountains, the casual attitude and the mild weather (I hadn’t yet experienced the Northwest rain.)
Before taking the position in Indiana, I had been scouring the west coast for jobs. By the time The Olympian offered me the Olympia City Hall beat, I might have just settled down in Indiana. But this was it, my last chance to make it to the west coast before I turned 30.
I decided to go for it. I joined a smaller paper to take on a much bigger role. I immersed myself in learning how the state capital ticks, how land-use planning works and how the political game is played.
My work showed the public how City Council members were skirting open meeting laws by deliberating city business by email. The mayor moved to stop the practice.
I exposed abuses in the Olympia, Wash. parks department, including anti-gay discrimination and misuse of city equipment, which culminated in the resignation of the department's director and the demotion or transfer of several employees.
My stories were the first to reveal that a City Council member was a drug dealer. He resigned and was convicted. Then I revealed the confidential informant who helped bust him was a former councilman.
In 2013, marriage and family took me back took me from the Northwest back to the Southeast in dramatic fashion. In one month, I moved across the country, was married, and started a new job at the Nashville Business Journal. My wife, a native Nashvillian, and I were tired of seeing our families only about twice a year. We like "once a week" better.
This year, I’ve segued into freelance writing and looking for a more stable full-time job opportunity in not just journalism, but also the marketing, public relations and corporate communications fields.
I lost that old paper from 1977 during my move. Traveling light, most of what I couldn’t fit in my 2004 Honda Civic was mailed through the postal service. Of all those boxes, one was lost. In that box was the newspaper.
To me, it’s symbolic about what’s happening with the news business. Readers are leaving print media behind. It is my hope that I can continue to gather and package information for years to come in whatever media people want – written, spoken, electronic or some platform not yet dreamed.
April 18, 1977. The day I was born.
The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky.
The newspaper where I would work for nearly six years.
In a funny way, it seemed like my destiny was confirmed. My parents had set aside that paper as the memory of my birthday, left it in storage after two moves and never told me about it. I wouldn’t see it until adulthood. And they apparently didn’t save any papers for any of my eight siblings, all younger.
By that time, I was already a rookie journalist. The news bug bit me much sooner. It was a love of news, not strictly newspapers, that has defined my career.
I can trace it back to at least sixth grade at St. Pius grade school in Louisville. In a few lucky occasions, social studies class would be transformed into a current events quiz, game-show style. Each participating student had a rudimentary buzzer to slam when they knew the answer to the teacher’s questions.
I found that I did. I liked to watch the evening news.
In seventh grade, there was a new type of current events quiz. The buzzers were gone, and it was just student and teacher, one on one. But this time, my teacher selected me to put together a summary of important world events for the rest of the class to study.
I hand-wrote a synthesis of the network news on one sheet of paper and my teacher made copies for the whole class.
It wasn’t long until I was making my own newspaper with hand-drawn illustrations and stories hammered out on an electric typewriter. My brother Brian did the comics. One of the big news stories was addition of a new family cat, Timothy. I was in business.
Ever since I started writing my own “books” at about age 5, I had always tried to hawk them for a nickel or a dime. They even had their own house ads.
Like most kids, I dreamed about different careers. I enjoyed watching birds and thought I might become an ornithologist. I was fascinated with maps and the way Interstate highways covered the nation, and thought I might be a cartographer.
Somewhere between grade school and the middle of high school, I decided I wanted to be a newspaper journalist. I can credit my parents for, as far back as I can remember, keeping a Sunday subscription to The Courier-Journal.
Perhaps I started reading the paper, not a common activity for children, as an antidote to Sunday boredom. My dad was the sole breadwinner, working sometimes six days a week as an electrician at the Phillip Morris cigarette plant in Louisville. Sunday was the only day he would reliably have off. So he liked to stick around the house and spend the day with his family.
That left me a lot of time to spend with the Sunday paper. I started off just reading the comics, but then I fell in love with the news. Simply put, I loved being the first to know what was happening. I would regularly take a breather from my schoolwork to hear the radio news on the hour, my sole medium for breaking news. I had no idea how much that would change.
In my senior year of high school, I finally got to shadow a real, live, working journalist. Jack Brammer, Frankfort bureau chief for the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, graciously showed me a day at the Kentucky state capitol.
By then, I was sold on newspaper journalism. I entered the journalism program at Western Kentucky University, and before classes began, I was filling out an application to work for the student newspaper.
After three months of hard work, I got noticed and my first newspaper story ran on the front page, a color piece about Election Day 1996.
Now it was time to work for a real newspaper. My professors at Western were adamant from the start of college that internships were the key to a newspaper career. I accepted an internship my freshman year writing for the Evansville (Ind.) Courier, a paper of about 65,000 daily circulation.
It wasn’t purely a news job. I wrote for a quasi-marketing publication called Progress, extolling the virtues of growth in small towns in southwestern Indiana, Southeastern Illinois and western Kentucky. My task was to write about growth, development and tourism in these towns for a once-yearly supplement that would be tucked inside the newspaper.
But it gave me a chance to prove I could write. I traveled from small town to smaller town, meeting government and business leaders and getting to know a lot of backroads.
It was a great experience that led me to my next summer gig at the Courier's afternoon competition, The Evansville (Ind.) Press. The Press was a scrappy, failing afternoon newspaper about to succumb to changing reader habits, but not until the end of its Joint Operating Agreement with the morning Courier on Dec. 31, 1998. That meant it had one summer of life left in it.
I was there, covering everything – cops, City Hall, general assignment – as more reporters left for stable jobs. That’s why the editors sent a guy who just finished his sophomore year in college to cover a triple-murder homicide an hour and two counties away.
I wrote two second-day stories about the tragedy, which won first place in the spot news category of the Hearst Journalism Awards, which is considered the Pulitzer of college journalism. The Hearst Foundation shipped me out to San Francisco to compete against a handful of other college journalists in a writing competition. I was a finalist, but didn’t place in the competition.
That had to wait until the following year. I earned the right to return to San Francisco for the best editorial in the collegiate world, “Hush Money.” As opinion editor at Western’s student paper, I penned an editorial condemning the university’s practice of paying cash settlements to employees accused of sexual harassment.
I placed second overall nationally in the Hearst competition.
My third internship, at the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, took me the farthest from home. I was most proud of my portrait of the demise of a historic preservation organization that sank into bankruptcy.
I returned to Kentucky for my fourth and final internship at the second-largest paper in the state, the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader. That summer, I examined the state’s arcane alcohol control laws that permit alcohol sales in some counties but allow others to ban it decades after national prohibition ended.
After climbing the student newspaper ranks, from reporter, to opinion editor, to news editor, to feature columnist, to assistant features editor, I graduated in 2000.
I pondered traveling with my journalism skills, particularly to the west coast that I first discovered in San Francisco. But my first job offer out of college came from my hometown paper, the paper I grew up reading.
The Courier-Journal.
I couldn’t pass it up. I worked the night cops/general assignment beat for my first year at the C-J. I chased fires, shootings and hostage situations. I profiled a native Kentuckian who died in one of the jetliners on 9/11, the top local story on 9/12.
After a year on the night beat, I moved to days and the biggest beat on the paper’s suburban desk, covering Eastern Jefferson County. This was the land of the rich and richer, the province of both old-money mansions and hard-charging suburban sprawl. I covered City Councils in the suburban cities of Jeffersontown, Middletown, Anchorage and Prospect, earning an appreciation for small-town civics and following the money in municipal budgets.
My work earned me a promotion to the Courier’s southern Indiana bureau, across the Ohio River from Louisville in nearby Clarksville. I covered the city of New Albany and Floyd County, Ind. I even had my own office. But I still felt that itch to travel with my journalism degree. I was almost 30. Either I put down roots in Kentucky, as nearly everyone in my extended family has, or make a break for it.
I chose the latter. I had fallen in love with the Northwest during an impromptu, weeklong trip to Portland in 2005. I loved hiking in the mountains, the casual attitude and the mild weather (I hadn’t yet experienced the Northwest rain.)
Before taking the position in Indiana, I had been scouring the west coast for jobs. By the time The Olympian offered me the Olympia City Hall beat, I might have just settled down in Indiana. But this was it, my last chance to make it to the west coast before I turned 30.
I decided to go for it. I joined a smaller paper to take on a much bigger role. I immersed myself in learning how the state capital ticks, how land-use planning works and how the political game is played.
My work showed the public how City Council members were skirting open meeting laws by deliberating city business by email. The mayor moved to stop the practice.
I exposed abuses in the Olympia, Wash. parks department, including anti-gay discrimination and misuse of city equipment, which culminated in the resignation of the department's director and the demotion or transfer of several employees.
My stories were the first to reveal that a City Council member was a drug dealer. He resigned and was convicted. Then I revealed the confidential informant who helped bust him was a former councilman.
In 2013, marriage and family took me back took me from the Northwest back to the Southeast in dramatic fashion. In one month, I moved across the country, was married, and started a new job at the Nashville Business Journal. My wife, a native Nashvillian, and I were tired of seeing our families only about twice a year. We like "once a week" better.
This year, I’ve segued into freelance writing and looking for a more stable full-time job opportunity in not just journalism, but also the marketing, public relations and corporate communications fields.
I lost that old paper from 1977 during my move. Traveling light, most of what I couldn’t fit in my 2004 Honda Civic was mailed through the postal service. Of all those boxes, one was lost. In that box was the newspaper.
To me, it’s symbolic about what’s happening with the news business. Readers are leaving print media behind. It is my hope that I can continue to gather and package information for years to come in whatever media people want – written, spoken, electronic or some platform not yet dreamed.