Maybe this is what happens when you’re been writing newspaper stories for more than 50 years, as I have.
I woke up the other night from a dream and before it evaporated realized I was dreaming in newspaper terms.
The dream had a lead paragraph, and then evolved in the customary inverted pyramid style, important things at the start with it finishing up with a few facts that could have been lopped off if the story were too long.
It had all the elements: who, what, where, why, when and how.
To be truthful I don’t remember what the dream was about, just its structure and that it fit nicely into what I learned in journalism classes at Pitt State, back when journalism 101 was all about newspaper reporting. Television and radio were step-kids, though soon to become more robust than we ever thought at the time.
Keep the lead to the point, avoid distractions, I remember Dick Korns telling me and a gaggle of other students eager to make their mark. Tell the story, but don’t pad it; even then readers were thought to have some urgency about finishing one story and moving on to the next.
Most of all be pertinent, he said.
And never, absolutely never, make up anything; be accurate to a fault. If you don’t know how to spell a person’s name with absolute certainty, check it out, he’d rail. Credibility flees quickly and is hard to recover when you make a conspicuous mistake.
I’ve made mistakes through the years — ones other than stupid bets on sports, like putting $1 on the Royals signing the Tanaka kid — and whenever I misspelled a person’s name, the regret nagged at me for days. Unless, of course, as is so common today that someone spells their name in a weird way, such as Baub for Bob.
That I was in a journalism class at PSU, was happenstance. I started as a math major, and after doing little more than meandering along for a while — differential equations was a bear — I turned to English/journalism. I had found it to my liking from working nights at the Pittsburg Sun.
What better job could there be?
You aren’t nailed to a work station, get to talk to lots of interesting people, and the coffee’s free.
— Bob Johnson
Job turns into sweet dreams
