College essay: Professional

In the summer of 2002, I went into my office, turned off the lights, locked the door, sat in the dark and thought long and hard about when I had been happiest.

It wasn’t that I was in a bad place, career-wise; far from it. I was working as a public relations coordinator for arguably the most successful American videogame development house, making a good living, had my own private office and we had just announced World of Warcraft, which would go on to become one of the most successful computer games in history.

But I wasn’t happy.

In 1998, I had moved to California to be with the woman I would later marry, but had moved into a difficult media market without a job prospect and had ended up working for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, repackaging other people’s work for clients’ Web sites. When the Chicago Tribune bought out the paper and closed down my division, I ended up doing PR for Blizzard Entertainment.

I kept my hand in with journalism, reporting for the most popular comic book Web site, but it wasn’t the same. I missed the adrenaline rush of chasing a big story, wanting to be accurate, be thorough, be complete and even be first. And after 9/11, I missed feeling like, on a good day, I had made the world at least a slightly better place at the end of the day.

So, in the summer of 2002, with the blessing and encouragement of my wife, I again plunged into the job market without prospects but with a goal. I ended up working at a weekly newspaper in her hometown, reentering the industry where I had come in, in community journalism, covering local politics, business and features.

I hadn’t intended to become a journalist when I first went to Virginia Tech. I had planned on becoming a disc jockey, a dream that died when I discovered I didn’t enjoy spending hours by myself in a small room that smelled of stale coffee, body odor and, in those days, cigarettes.

While I tried to figure out what to change my major to, my advisor suggested I try out the school’s new Electronic News Gathering class. It was a revelation: With a camera on my shoulder and microphone in my hand, there was seemingly no place that I couldn’t go and no one I couldn’t meet. Virginia Tech’s ENG class was hands-on, and each week we assembled a 30-minute news broadcast that went out on the campus cable system.

Unfortunately, after I’d taken a year of the class, I found the more theoretical broadcasting and communications classes couldn’t keep my attention the same way, and I devoted more time to the campus newspapers and television station than I did my studies. I received a solid hands-on education but don’t generally have the grades to show for it.

After college, I dutifully sent my resume tape out to small market stations around the region, but needed to get a job sooner rather than later, as my parents were moving overseas for my father’s work. At the suggestion of my girlfriend, with a whole one major newspaper story under my belt, I applied for a reporting job at the local daily, the 1,300 circulation News Messenger in Christiansburg, Virginia. To my surprise, I landed the position and went through a heady period where every week, I could see and feel my skills improving on the job.

Almost 16 years and four newspapers later, it’s clear to me that this is what I want to do. I don’t want to be an editor, I don’t want to be a publisher, I want to be a reporter. I want to be the person the readers can rely on to be at the events they can’t attend, to give them analysis they can trust and to be the watchdog they can put their faith in.

If I could go back to the fall of 1987, when I arrived on the Virginia Tech campus as a freshman, I would study journalism from the start and write for the Collegiate Times. Instead, I find myself armed with skills that I’ve learned on the job, and probably my share of bad habits as well.

If this is to be my life’s work, I want to start the third act better prepared, with a solid journalism education, top drawer training and my bad habits shattered.

College essay: Autobiographical

In a way, it’s all my father’s fault.

When most fathers were teaching their sons how to work on car engines, dunk a basketball or tie fishing lures, my father was teaching me how to incapacitate an attacker with car keys or a ballpoint pen, how to turn a rolled-up magazine into a makeshift knife and what to do in the event of an attempted carjacking.

I grew up an Army brat and, later, a Foreign Service brat, moving every one to two years for most of my life. I’ve lived in four foreign countries and multiple locations within eight states. Forever the new kid in town, smaller than most of my classmates until late in my high school career and armed with a smart mouth that I had trouble keeping shut, I found myself on the outside looking in as a general rule.

In my experience, there are two reactions to growing up a nomad: You either put down roots as quickly as you can and never leave or you never put down roots, and continue rolling along like a tumbleweed. I fall into the latter camp, bouncing around the country, over to Egypt and back in the 15 years since graduating from Virginia Tech.

To this day, the longest period of time that I’ve lived any place was the six years I spent in Blacksburg, Virginia, where I went to college and then worked at my first newspaper, the News-Messenger in neighboring Christiansburg.

In addition to the self-defense lessons taught by my father — inspired by a synagogue bombing in Vienna, a car-bombing of an embassy support building in Brussels and other events too obscure to make the headlines stateside — I learned something else from Dad: How to speak to everyone on their own terms, without obvious prejudice or judgment, and get them to open up to me. My father did this for a living in the Foreign Service, but it’s part of his basic nature, and is something I picked up as part of my own.

My upbringing and his example imbued in me an insatiable curiosity for people, places and sights unknown to me. I’ve attended exorcisms held by the Cairo superintendent of schools, flown in a blimp over RFK Stadium and tromped through what remains of Bosnia.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone in government service his entire career, my father taught me to have a healthy skepticism for those in authority. Living overseas, in the era before the World Wide Web or even English-language television available via satellite, my brother and I read whatever we could get our hands on. And what filled our home were stories of rebels and scoundrels, from Huckleberry Finn to Slippery Jim diGriz to Harry Flashman.

This skepticism even extended to the dinner table: Asserting a fact in my family, no matter how mundane, meant being able to back it up with the dictionary or the almanac (always the current edition) or newspaper.

There are things that I wish I had gotten from him that I didn’t. Dad has an easy way with languages, and taught himself functional Portuguese before a trip to Lisbon simply by listening to Berlitz tapes in the car on the way to and from the Brussels embassy for several weeks. Instead, I know a smattering of Austrian German, a smattering of Belgian French, a smattering of Egyptian Arabic and a smattering of American Sign Language. Nor do I have his ability to play music by ear or to pick up a musical instrument and teach myself to play through an hour or so of experimentation. But having gotten so much from him, it hardly seems fair to complain.

My father didn’t set out to mold me into becoming a journalist — there were years where the government bureaucrat and I didn’t see eye to eye on my profession and I was held to account for everything he disliked about CNN, for instance — but that was the net result.

As much as if he had set out to do so, it’s my father’s fault that I became a journalist.

The die is cast

The grad school application has been sent. All that remains is the writing test before the 20th and crossing my fingers until sometime in April.

This week in the Associated Press

Monday’s Daily Press story about Donald Cooper, the Hesperia man who is now in jail, four years after pleading guilty to sexually violating the corpse of a 4-year-old girl, has been picked up by the Associated Press. (It’s up to eight pages of comments on the San Francisco Chronicle site as of this moment.)

My byline was not attached.

Hesperia Star API review

We just got our API scores, and we did well!

These aren’t the same API scores that California schools get (the Academic Performance Index). Instead, many newspapers are reviewed by the American Press Institute, based on selected copies of the paper. (API asks for specific dates and, as I recall, we were able to give a few choice papers of our selection.)

Here’s what the judges said about Freedom papers as a whole:

Capturing the top quality ranking was – Ft. Walton Beach, with a score of 152.5. It also won the first “Freedom Double” by scoring highest in both the print and Web evaluations. Marysville (147.5), Lima (146), The Orange County Register (141), East Valley Tribune (138), and Alton, which tied with Jacksonville (Ill.) with 135.5, were runners up in the quality competition.

The daily papers registering the most improvement in print scores since last year were Victorville (+26), Jacksonville, Ill (+14.5) and Sun City (+10).

Port St. Joe (+20), The Island Breeze (+15.5), and, Hesperia (+13.5) were the most improved weekly papers

In terms of web valuations, The Orange County Register tied Fort Walton Beach for highest score. Colorado Springs, Lima, Mesa, Destin, Shelby, McAllen and Alton also recorded high marks in web grading.

I’m pretty sure I can’t reprint the evaluations in their entirety — they’re either the property of API or Freedom Communications, I assume — but the Hesperia Star received a 110.5 score for print and 89 for the Web (out of 170 and 150, respectively). (The Daily Press got a 131 and 111 with, officially, 16 times the staff.)

We got “Excellent” ratings in content variety and balance and in service information, and also scored well in relevance to readers, reporting and writing (just shy of “Excellent,” there), editorial pages/editorials and headlines.

I was singled out for needing a bit more help on my photographs and for cutting down some of my gigantic ledes, neither of which are a surprise or anything I disagree with. I’ll be making a special effort on both those fronts this year.

We’ll also be reading through the evaluations for the Freedom papers that did better than us, so that we may shamelessly rip off what works and make the paper even better. Watch your back, Ft. Walton Beach!