Learning Journalism
During the year Jackson was editor-in-chief, a faculty member guided Technician staff on seeking news and writing articles.
Interview on 2012-09-27 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
00:00:00.000
That year they actually appointed a faculty member to help us. [Laughs] And this fellow was a neat guy who had been a newspaper man at some point in his career before he became a college professor, so we had an on-the-job training class in journalism.
00:00:25.643
Journalism, what’s that? We’re so busy running the paper we don’t have time to learn journalism, [Laughs] you know. So he worked with us and we assigned reporters to beats.
00:00:41.495
We each had a beat and we’d go try to drum up news. In the past it was just kind of take whatever press release you could get or whatever AP copy you could find or something and cobble together something to say.
00:00:57.903
I would be probably the last guy there. It might be midnight or something and everything was set except the editorial, so then I had to–.
00:01:09.315
You know, I can’t get to bed until I write an editorial so I need to think of something to talk about, and I go back and I look at some of the subjects, I don’t know where they came from. [Laughs]
00:01:23.891
But we would complain about, oh, this walkway needs paving, or there are too many bricks here and we need less bricks, or they’re closing the traffic gates too early.
00:01:38.057
I mean it was just ridiculous stuff. We didn’t think it was ridiculous but it was our little insulated world. We were in our own little world.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
