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Showing posts from March, 2014

The newspaper route, part 2: The vast newsroom

In the fall of 1989, I was sophomore at Marquette, assistant sports editor at the Marquette Tribune , and not yet 19 years old. The Tribune was located in the basement of Johnston Hall in a windowless with a dozen or so old steel desks and eight computers (if we needed more, the College of Journalism's editing lab was down the hall in an even more claustrophobic room). A year in the basement had been my newspaper experience by that fall. I don't remember how I found out that the Milwaukee Journal sports department was hiring part-time reporters and clerks, but however I did, I called and managed to score an interview with the sports editor. I put on a tie and cut a class to walk to the newspaper offices, less than a mile from my dorm. There's no real happy ending here -- I wasn't hired. I lacked the transportation for the open part-time reporter's job, and probably wasn't quite as experienced at the time as some others to get the clerk job (the hours were h