I got my start in the newspaper business in the early ’70s, working on the student newspaper at the University of South Florida in Tampa to defray my tuition.
I immediately went wrong, using previously acquired photographic skills to become a photographer instead of using my brand-new classroom skills to become a reporter. Photographers had more interesting gadgets and spent most of their time outside the office.
Somewhere in there, I became a newsroom computer geek, helping one of my professors uncrate and deploy some typewriter-like tape-punching machines and photo typesetters from Compugraphic. I was a photographer by day, apprentice printer by night and student all the time.
Much to the dismay of my parents, it got worse. Watergate and Lou Grant combined to make my career respectable, even glamorous, and I never looked back.
I was on staff at The Tampa Tribune for three years, striking out on my own in 1976 as a freelancer with a handful of contracts. ABC Records and an automobile battery manufacturer kept me going for a couple of years. ABC was more fun, but the battery folks kept the bank account charged better.
The offer of a steady paycheck, sweetened by the sun and sand of Sarasota, sidetracked my freelance career. I stayed at the Sarasota paper two years, actually using my college training as a copy editor, layout editor and news editor.
I left there for a brief stint as an editor at the Orlando Sentinel, but living in the Land Of Mickey wasn’t for me.
Luckily, in late 1980, The Times-Picayune in New Orleans offered me a job as a copy editor.
I worked at the Picayune for 12 years, moving routinely between news production jobs and news editing jobs. (News production jobs let you play with really big gadgets in composing and the pressroom, as well as reinforce the need to meet deadlines.)
By 1985, I was the Sunday News Editor, the editor who sought out, accepted (or rejected) and designed everything in the news sections of the Sunday newspaper, a job I kept until 1992.
Somewhere in that time, I picked up a computer manual, trying to figure out something my Systems Department said could not be done. Before I knew it, I was the resident computer guy, I had spearheaded the newsroom’s pagination project and helped integrate an electronic picture desk and Macintosh network.
I joined The New York Times in 1992 as an editor in the Newsroom Technology Office. I was essentially an on-staff consultant for technology issues, whether related to coverage of them or their use in the paper’s production.
I tracked cyberspace issues, technology productivity tools, wrote a column on business-related web sites and converted the newsroom to multimedia computers, allowing every reporter and editor in the building access to a wide range of computer assisted reporting tools.
In late 1997, I left The Times. I now work as a freelance writer and technology consultant, bringing into play the wide range of tools picked up along the way.
Oddly enough, leaving The Times freed me up enough to actually write for it on a regular basis. No staff meetings, I guess. So I write for them, Money magazine's web site, Family Money and some others. Periodically, I put on my MIS hat and do what the kids call "real work," a function that had me in Texas running the IT department of Belo Interactive, an Internet startup carved out of the Belo Corporation. I later became deputy editor of Interactive Week, a member of the Ziff-Davis Media family of computer publications that became another victim of 9/11.
Since then, I have run a website for unemployed journalists, 8goodpeople (thankfully, it is defunct, and they're all employed) and ramped up a technology consulting business I'd been running on the side for years.
Drop us a line, and we can talk about what I can do for you.
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