Tag Archives: Oregon City

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Time of My Life, Part 40: Sharing experiences with students

One of the many joys of working as a journalist — and I had too many of them to count — was being given the chance to tell young people about the challenges of my craft.

Those opportunities came in the form of “career day” events at local schools. Whether in Oregon or in Texas, there was a time when educators thought enough of journalists and journalism to invite us into their classrooms to talk to students about career potential and what it takes to do what we did.

Over many years standing in front of students, I eventually developed a sort of pre-determined formal introduction. I usually would begin by telling students that “I have the best job in town. I get to report on our community and I get to foist my opinion on thousands of newspaper readers every day.”

I’d get a chuckle out of the students. Perhaps from their teachers, too.

I don’t know these days, given the pummeling that newspapers are taking in the current media market, what print journalists are telling students. I suspect it has something to do with the myriad pressures being exerted on newspapers, how they’re having to compete with the Internet, cable TV and assorted other media outlets.

One particular career day stands out among all the times I got to speak to students. I want to share it with you.

It was in 1983. I was working as editor of a small afternoon daily, The Enterprise-Courier, in Oregon City, Ore. My phone rang one day and on the other end was a gentleman named John Eide, who was the shop teacher at Harvey W. Scott Elementary School in Portland, where I attended as a boy. Mr. Eide invited me back to Harvey Scott School to give a career day presentation.

I hadn’t darkened the door at that school for 20-plus years. For this gentleman to call me and invite me back was a singular honor. It blew my mind.

So, I went back to Harvey Scott School for the day. I walked into the office and got reacquainted with my fifth-grade shop teacher. He then took me to Carl Hendricksen’s classroom. Mr. Hendricksen happened to be my sixth-grade teacher back in the day. To see him, with his hair turned snowy white, absolutely knocked me out!

I spent the day there, talking to students about newspapers, telling them about the challenges I faced each day publishing a newspaper that competed with the then-mighty Portland Oregonian.

Arguably, the highlight of the visit was walking into the school cafeteria. Perhaps others have experienced the same thing. This was a first for me: The cafeteria smelled precisely as I remembered it two decades earlier. It was as if I walked through a time portal and stood in a sort of parallel universe.

Career days such as that one routinely offered me the chance to share the joys and challenges of a career I was privileged to pursue. I hope my successors in the business are able to speak with as much enthusiasm about journalism as I did.

local news, media news

Time of My Life, Part 21: What goes around, comes around

It’s no secret that newspapers are cutting staff to maintain their profitability in the face of the changing media climate that has produced declining circulation and advertising revenue.

The Amarillo Globe-News in Texas is no exception — quite obviously! — to that trend. The G-N, indeed, managed to eliminate its entire photo staff over time, instructing the reporters it has left on staff to shoot their own pictures while covering events.

Well, guess what! That isn’t a new notion for some of us who got their start in small-town newspapering back in the day.

My reporting career began full-time in the spring of 1977. I got hired at the Oregon City (Ore.) Enterprise-Courier as a temporary sports writer; the sports editor, one of the very few women in the business, had taken maternity leave to give birth to her daughter. The editor of the paper needed someone to fill in. I applied; he hired me; then a position opened up on the news staff and I was allowed to stay after the sports editor returned from her leave.

Part of my job was to take pictures along with reporting on events I was covering. Football games? Basketball games? Wrestling matches? I packed my notebook and pen — and a camera! Then I became a general assignment news reporter, so I took my camera to city council, school board and county commission meetings. I had to take what we called “wild art” photos we would publish without a story accompanying them.

I knew how to report on those events and how to write about them in cogent manner. Photography was a brand new concept. I had to learn about “photo composition” and how to eliminated “dead space” in pictures.

That was just part of it. I also had to learn how to develop those pictures. Yes, we had dark rooms back then. They had basins filled with smelly chemicals into which we had to dump our film. Then we had to dry the film on lines strung across the dark room. Once the negatives were dry, we then had to print what we called “contact sheets,” which were “positive” reproductions of the images on the “negatives.”

Yes, those were days when reporting and writing also include plenty of picture-taking. We were well-rounded back then, just as reporters today are being asked to become more well-rounded now.

I hope the kids today have as much fun as I did back in the journalism “stone age.”

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‘Routine traffic stop’ is never routine

Critiquing local media isn’t among my favorite things to do — Lord knows I made my share of mistakes over 37 years in daily print journalism — but a local news anchor committed an error I cannot let pass.

The 10 p.m. newscast led with a story about a drug bust on Interstate 40. Texas Department of Public Safety troopers pulled a vehicle over and — lo and behold — found a load of dope. Who knew, right?

The news anchor then uttered that time-honored phrase that a lot of young journalists use unwittingly. He referred to the incident as a “routine traffic stop.”

I now will make three points.

First, the news anchor isn’t a fresh-faced youngster looking to make his mark here before moving to a “larger market.” NewsChannel 10’s Walt Howard has been doing his job for at least as long as I’ve been in Amarillo, which has passed the 19-year mark.

Second, I’d bet the farm that the traffic stop in question wasn’t a real traffic stop at all. DPS troopers had a pretty idea what they had found when they pulled the vehicle over. It ain’t a coincidence, kids, that they found the drugs in the car. They either were profiling the occupants of the vehicle or they had a tip that the vehicle was coming through the area.

Third, and this is the most critical point of all, every police officer who’s ever worn a badge will tell you, “There is no such thing as a routine traffic stop.” I made that mistake once while writing a news story for a small paper where I worked in Oregon City, Ore. I referred to a traffic stop as “routine.” I got a call the next day from the late Bill Brooks, who at the time was chief deputy for the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office. He scolded me about the use of the term “routine” and reminded me of this fact: Any traffic stop has the potential for erupting into something far more serious and potentially tragic.

He implored me never to use that description again when reporting incidents involving police stopping motorists.

Lesson learned, Bill.