Newspaper Reporting for Dummies (How to Be a Bad Reporter Without Even Trying) the Beginning

So when was it that I decided that I wanted to be a newspaper reporter? It never was an idea of mine. In fact I was a broadcast journalism major at a major midwest university. With ambitions of being one of the next big anchors on network television. In 1981 or thereabouts that would have been one of the great ones. Like Ed Bradley or Walter Cronkite if you get my drift. I could see it now. This is the news with me!!! My face a nightly fixture on the television. My voice booming into the microphone. Easier said than done. Much easier. First I had to finish all the dumb or what i viewed as a waste of time. The prerequisites to getting out of university college. Like biology,business,foreign language all that mandatory stuff. The crazy part is that I really hated that stuff. Mind you...I did know I needed them. But I guess I wanted to get to the finish line but I just didn't want to have to run to get there. To make a long story short I actually failed miserably in all the required subjects. And I made really good passing grades in my major such as voice and diction, introduction to radio and television and interpersonal communications. But none of those subjects counted until I was a Junior or Senior in my university.

Eventually, I was academically dismissed. In fact things got so bad for me. Because I had no place to stay when I got kicked out of school. A friend of mine who lived off campus let me keep some of my furniture, stereo type things at his apartment. My church helped me with food and finding a place to stay until I could get back home to Virginia.
When I did get back home. I had one of two choices. Go back to school or join the military. I chose the latter. It was this choice that would eventually lead me into the world of newspaper journalism. But how you ask?

In 1984 I entered the United States Air Force. Let me skip past boot-camp,tech school and combat school to my first yard (soldier jargon for my first military assignment) Hahn Air Base in Germany. One day I was reading the Stars & Stripes. The major world issue in my opinion was Apartheid in South Africa. Inclusive of the sanctions. President Reagan's timid approach to clamping down on the murderous policy of apartheid and the death and destruction it was causing to the black majority in the country. What could I do ? I knew the power of what the pen could do. If you were a really good writer or if you were a professional journalist and you could reach a far reaching audience. But I never saw myself as that type of person. Having that ability or that power. Until one day me and my then fiancee were watching this music video in the bowling alley. It was called "SUN City Artists against Apartheid" and it had some really graphic scenes of what was really happening to the oppressed in South Africa. That was the catalyst that made me dive into newspaper "letter" writing or I started my foray into "Dear Editor" letters. To date I may have over 500 letters to the editor that I know of. I have lost count. Some I will never know of due to the fact that I am not always notified all the time when in fact one of my letters is printed. That day after we saw that video. I wrote a letter to the S & S in protest of apartheid. I had every right without it interfering with the laws of my host nation Germany or the laws of the United States or the regulations of the military. In fact I wrote my first letter free-handed in pencil then I re-wrote it in ink. I passed it around to get an opinion. Some liked it and some didn't and some didn't even care. My final letter I wrote in ink in my best penmanship and mailed it to the Stars & Stripes letters to the editor. Then I did not give my letter another thought. I am not sure how much time went by. But one day one of my Air Force buddies asked me if I saw my letter? I asked what letter. The letter I had sent to the Stars and Stripes. How did he know? He told me he had read it and thought it was pretty good. He told me I better get a copy of the paper so I could read it. It was almost my proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. All over the base people were buzzing about my letter. Makes you think about that movie if I were to pick one, with Barabara Streisand :A STAR IS BORN. Perhaps this sounds a bit egotistical on my part. But I'd need it and more and what my J-School professor at the University of South Carolina called growing a Sixth skin when it came down to how much rejection you'd get when it came to newspaper writing no matter what kind of writing for whatever publication.

STAY TUNED FOR Mr. Chip's NEXT INSTALLMENT (Newspaper Reporting for Dummies):The World of letters to the editor