It’s hard to credit the melancholy predictions concerning the future of print journalism when you’re presented with an up-and-coming reporter as talented as Jason Tidd.
Tidd, an incoming senior at K-State — and the news editor of that school’s paper, “The Collegian” — began his summer internship with the Register last week.
It’s a familiar alliance. “I actually delivered newspapers for the Register from when I was a third grader to when I was a freshman in high school,” remembers Tidd. “And my sisters deliver papers right now.”
In fact, there’s hardly a Tidd in this town that hasn’t toted the Register at one time or another. Josh, Joel, Jonathan, Jennifer, Jessica — Jason’s sibs — were all carriers. But the effects of the ink lingered longer in the third-eldest, who recalls, as a kid, reading the paper from front to back while waiting for a car ride home at the end of his route.
“I even remember reading John Hanna then,” says Tidd, referring to the steadfast Associated Press correspondent who covers the Kansas Legislature. “I didn’t understand much of what he said, as a third-grader, but I do remember reading him.”
STILL, it wasn’t until midway through his senior year at Iola High School that Tidd was awakened to the idea that he might write news for a living. An important tipping point was an English class he took with Betty Hawley.
“Before high school, I really didn’t like English. I liked math, because it was always 2+2=4, while a phrase in English might mean something different than what you first thought it meant.”
Eventually, though, Tidd’s preference for the hard certainties of math gave way to an appreciation for the shaded registers of language — but it took the Bard to get him there. “It was during the Shakespeare unit, when we had to write our own sonnets. Before that section, I despised the class. After that, I loved it. I went home and, for two weeks straight, I wrote a sonnet every night. … At that point, I realized maybe writing is something I want to do.”
But of course, today, as a burgeoning newshound, Tidd’s ambitions for language are not poetic, at least not primarily.
“If I could choose between being an F. Scott Fitzgerald” — famous for his long, embroidered sentences — “or an Ernest Hemingway” — known for his short, dagger-sharp lines — “I would choose to be more like Hemingway. I like the clear prose. I like getting to the point. I appreciate language that can set the scene, too — just as long as the point is not lost in the language. As long as you can convey what you want it to convey. I don’t want to turn off readers.”
“TO ME, being a reporter is being both the ultimate student and the ultimate teacher,” says Tidd. “I feel like, as a reporter, if you aren’t learning something each day, you’re not doing it right. Just like a mother could ask a kindergarten student ‘What did you learn in school today?’, you should be able to ask a reporter ‘What did you learn today?’ … If you didn’t learn something, you didn’t do it right. And if your reader didn’t learn something by reading your story, you didn’t write it correctly.”
WORKING AT “The Collegian” these last three years — where he cleared $75 every two weeks as an editor and often didn’t clock out until well after midnight — Tidd is inured to the low pay and ragged hours of newspaper life. But he’s no less dedicated to the profession because of those defects.
