About four years ago, Tony Dodero, my boss at the time, asked me if I would like to be Times Community News’ web editor.
Me? I thought he was giving me way more credit than I deserved. I wanted the job, but I was intimidated by the technology. I didn’t know any html.
But Tony insisted. He introduced me to Dan Hontz, then the web guru for latimes.com. I confessed my fears to him.
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” he said, adding he taught himself everything he knows.
I remembered then that’s what I’ve done through my career. I’m not one for instruction manuals. Just give me a gadget, and I’ll figure it out.
Tony and I, with a great deal of help from Dan, launched TCN’s websites. I loved it. I mostly managed myself, and I got back to my roots. That may sound weird, considering the new technology. But as far as I’m concerned, web editing and reporting is just like working for the wires.
I got my first major-league break as a wire-service reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago. I had worked for several community newspapers throughout college and after I graduated, but I wanted to work for City News. It was where journalistic titans like Seymour Hersh and Mike Royko got their start. Even Kurt Vonnegut worked there.
It was the greatest job I’ve had. A lot of my reporter friends think I’m nuts. It’s like longing for boot camp. A good day there was when you didn’t get screamed at for making a mistake. Once, I covered an anti-war protest that swelled from 25 people to thousands in a matter of minutes and shut down downtown Chicago — I did that myself for hours as the rest of the city’s media played catch-up. That was before cell phones, so I had to run from pay phone to pay phone.
At the end of the day, my boss Paul Zimbrakos said, “Atta boy.” He could have said, “You’re the greatest reporter I’ve ever worked with,” and it would have felt the same. I was elated.
I loved the madness of the wires. And I see it in web editing, blogging and the new media. I tell my colleagues who want to be web-centric that the key to it all is to go back and look at a very old media — the wires. You want your newsroom to move fast? Copy how they do it on the wires. It’s the same thing.
