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Showing posts from February, 2014

The newspaper route, part 1: Baseball cards and doorstep delivery

I'm trying to figure out why I decided to become a newspaper journalist. I don't mean that in a cynical way -- I just can't pinpoint in my youth when I went from not sure what I wanted to be when I grew up (aside from a video game designer) to deciding I wanted to work for a newspaper. I think I was a seventh-grader, but I can't declare there was a certain event that pushed me toward newspapers. It's not like I watched "Lou Grant" a lot or was inspired by "All the President's Men" (which I didn't see until I was an adult and is my favorite newspaper movie). I do know that in the eighth-grade remembrance booklet the class made for graduation, where we got to list what we wanted our career to be someday, I said journalist. Here's what else I know: I was fascinated by newspapers from about age 6. We'd get the Sun-Times, and my grandmother would sometimes buy the Sunday edition of Chicago Daily News, which was in it's death th