1 week Ago
This is a love letter ...
kinda. I’m just not sure if it’s to my long-ago youth or to a way of life that fulfilled me for 18 years. Joe Marren spent 18 years in the trenches of newsrooms.
I was a newspaper reporter for seven years and an editor for another 11. I miss that life, especially on Election Day or after watching movies about crusading newspapers that comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Time flies and I’ve shifted to teaching journalism.
I’m now in my 28th year at Buffalo State University. I love being in classrooms and sharing ideas with students. But I also feel at home in a newsroom.
I’m no Pollyanna, I know that newsrooms of the 21st century are leaner and different than the newsrooms of my day, but my nostalgia abides. On any given day newsrooms have a mix of energy, vitality, angst, sarcasm, kinship, humor, dread, and so much more that make paragraph factory denizens feel alive! So I’m going to give a nostalgic glimpse of that life. In my ramblings, though, I’m being vague about people and places to protect the innocent and the guilty.
I take as my example Carly Simon’s ode to an oh-so-vain boyfriend. And speaking of music, in my mind my newspaper days are set to Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark”: “I ain’t nothin’ but tired ..
.” I wrote for the student newspaper at Buff State when dinosaurs roamed the earth and had a choice to make after several semesters: Either become its news editor or take an internship covering high school sports for a local weekly. I picked the latter because I wanted to experience life outside the insular campus community, which meant I juggled school, my internship, my job that gave me a paycheck, and a meager social life.
It was hectic. For example, on May 18, 1985, I wrote a high school baseball game story in the morning and got married that afternoon. “Hey there, baby, I could use just a little help .
..” I was once the sports editor of a small Southern Tier newspaper.
Actually, I was sports department and had to be everywhere. I didn’t have a day off from the day high school football practice started in August until Thanksgiving. I even covered freshman football games.
There was one such game where parents were complaining about the coverage in the paper and then started booing me. That’s when the coach suggested I might be more comfortable on the opposite sideline. “Even if we’re just dancin’ in the dark .
..” When I was sports editor, I was the last person in the newsroom on weekend nights.
I’d be writing my game stories and laying out my pages while the pressroom waited. When I was done, and while I waited for the presses to start rolling, I’d hang out with the printers. I’ve won my share of state and national journalism awards, but the greatest honor I ever received was on my last night there (before I moved on to be a cityside reporter at another paper) when the printers let me push the button to start the presses.
“Man, I’m just tired and bored with myself ...
” When news stories were written on typewriters the signal to editors that the story was over was to write — 30 — at the bottom of the last page. So all that’s left to do now is write. Catch the latest in Opinion Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!.
