{"id":51629,"date":"2022-05-18T13:07:50","date_gmt":"2022-05-18T13:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=51629"},"modified":"2022-05-18T13:07:50","modified_gmt":"2022-05-18T13:07:50","slug":"take-the-mans-money-play-by-his-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=51629","title":{"rendered":"Take the man’s money, play by his rules"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A friend and former newspaper colleague once told me after I left daily journalism and got my blog going full blast that my blog proved something about me he suspected from the day I began working with him at the Amarillo Globe-News.<\/p>\n

It was that “you didn’t believe half the stuff you wrote for the newspaper,” my friend said.<\/p>\n

Well, my friend — who’s also out of the daily journalism grind — is every bit as astute as I knew him to be when we first met in early 1995.<\/p>\n

I make no apologies for writing editorials and for editing pages for a newspaper, the Amarillo Globe-News, with a strong conservative tradition. My friend was right, that I didn’t adhere to much of what I wrote on behalf of the publisher, to whom I reported directly.<\/p>\n

I told my then-boss that there were some lines I could not cross. They dealt with capital punishment, gun control and abortion. The newspaper opposed gun legislation, it favored capital punishment and was anti-choice on the issue of abortion; I tilted in the opposite direction on all three issues.<\/p>\n

He hired me anyway and for that I am grateful.<\/p>\n

I made a brief return to daily journalism at the end of 2021. The Dallas Morning News hired me as a temporary, part-time editorial writer. To his great credit, the editorial page editor for whom I worked told me he “never would ask” me to submit an editorial with which I disagreed in principle.<\/p>\n

I am grateful also for the leeway he extended.<\/p>\n

This is all part of what I have known since another ex-colleague and still-friend told me years ago. “If you take the man’s money,” he said, “then you have to play by the man’s rules.”\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Fair point. I now work for myself writing on High Plains Blogger, although my freelance work for the weekly Farmersville Times and for KETR-FM public radio allows to go back to what I learned how to do at the beginning of my journalism career. Which is to write straight news stories.<\/p>\n

I learned that skill a long time ago. I also have learned that one never loses one’s touch.<\/p>\n

And so … this gig keeps on producing more fun than I ever thought was possible.<\/p>\n

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n

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A friend and former newspaper colleague once told me after I left daily journalism and got my blog going full blast that my blog proved something about me he suspected from the day I began working with him at the Amarillo Globe-News. It was that “you didn’t believe half the stuff you wrote for the … Continue reading Take the man’s money, play by his rules<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10],"tags":[179,9128,2122,8436],"class_list":["post-51629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","category-media-news","tag-agn-media","tag-farmersville-times","tag-high-plains-blogger","tag-ketr-fm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51629"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51631,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51629\/revisions\/51631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}