The Story
Chapter 1
"The Newsroom"
Although born in New Jersey, I spent much of my growing years in the river valley of western Arkansas. My father operated a sandwich deli in Van Buren in the 1970s and I was always there helping out around the cafe as a small boy doing what I could and meeting new and interesting people.
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Early on, however, I was obsessed primarily with only three things: drawing, writing, and video games. I wrote my first "book" in the third grade and by eighth grade, as a journalism student at Kimmons Junior High, I had my first researched article published in a newspaper.
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That eighth-grade year was an important one. Computers were taking on an increasingly prominent role in schools in the mid '80s our new journalism advisor felt the time had come to use them in newspaper production. It was a ground-breaking decision. As I was told at the time, no school in the state was using computers for editing and layout; we were about to be the first.
Out of a class of some 20 journalism students, I was one of only three who had computer experience (I did a lot of BASIC programming on the Commodore 64). I was immediately named an editor for this simple reason. My co-editors and I quickly went to work learning a new desktop publishing software for the Apple computer called The Newsroom. We had to have a first issue ready for distribution at Kimmons in a few weeks.
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This was exciting stuff. I had looked forward to the traditional cut-and-paste approach to layout in advance of entering the class, but this was much more interesting. There was no precedent, no established guide for how to use this software. We were figuring it out as we went along. And we were establishing our own precedents for future journalism classes there.
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The first few issues bore all the expected scars of a rocky start. They just didn't look that good. But they got better, especially once we understood the limitations of The Newsroom. Weekends during the school year were often consumed by long hours at a computer lab at Westark Community College, where we laid out the papers. Our work caught the attention of the newspaper staff there and we became the subject of one of their own feature stories.
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Eventually, we figured out how to "hack" The Newsroom to do more with it -- although it wasn't technically hacking in the subversive sense. Digitizing photos and re-incorporating some cut-and-paste work allowed us make the issues look more dynamic, and more comfortable for young readers. The Newsroom was great, but there was only so much you could do with it. We had to learn to stretch its capabilities.
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We couldn't ask for a better instructor in Susan Haines. She was not only our teacher but also our friend and support system. After an amazing year working with her and my fellow editors, one of whom became a lifelong friend, there was never a doubt my future would remain in journalism.
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Little did I know that it would get more interesting that summer after the eighth-grade year.
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