First News Deadline

There are many things for which my Westfield State College degree in English and journalism well prepared me, but no academic institution can prepare you for the wide range of topics that a beat reporter must cover.

In my first year as a reporter for Granby and South Hadley, Massachusetts, I wrote about everything from DUIs to zoning squabbles to what life was like for priests living at a longtime Catholic seminary.

I tell interns the good news is that you don’t have to know everything before you start a job, that working is about learning. And I tell them the story of my first day on the job as a part-time correspondent at the Springfield Morning Union.

I knew almost nothing then about how town government functions or what a board of selectmen might be apt to discuss. I was 22 years old. Nevertheless, on my first day on the job, I was sent to cover the Granby Board of Selectmen. I was told only what time it met, and where.

First, of course, I had to figure out where Granby was in the Pioneer Valley and find its Town Hall. Then, I had to get my hands on the board’s agenda and try to figure out what on earth it all meant.

The meeting began at 7 p.m. My deadline for filing a story was 9:30 p.m., and the office where I needed to write and file that story was 25 minutes away. This gave me very little time to gather the news.

Fortunately, Granby is a small town, and not a whole lot happened during that meeting. The board appointed two people to town positions and also referred some agenda items to other boards.

I hustled back to my office, wrote a story that included background information on each of the folks who were appointed to new positions, and had my story in a few minutes early.

In the next few years, I got extremely good at writing on deadline. Sometimes I would have only an hour or so at a meeting, and by the time I returned to my office to get the story down, I might have only 15 or 20 minutes before the deadline. I got good at taking in detailed concepts and being able to write about them succinctly—very, very fast.

Writing budget stories was a particular specialty, which is unusual given that I am terrible at numbers; when making a deposit at the bank, for instance, I almost never get the math correct on the deposit slip.

When I left the news business in 1998 to start Beetle Press, the new learning I had to embrace was that I didn’t have to write stories—or produce other materials for clients—in 20 minutes or less.

I had discovered a new world in which I had time to do research in a thorough manner and time to really think through a piece. It’s a luxury I sometimes still need to remind myself about, but cranking out a press release for a client in a pinch is still a superpower I can own.

I spent 15 years in the news business in western Massachusetts, working for the Springfield paper and later the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton. I wrote about everything from pinching pierogis on an assembly line in Chicopee to mayoral elections in Northampton and Holyoke. I met people like Bill Cosby (who was not untoward with me), and I was on a first-name basis with state representatives, area mayors and city councilors.

Working as a journalist was a thrilling, fast-paced life, but I don’t miss being out every night at zoning and planning board meetings.

I am thrilled now that a former intern, Shelby Ashline, who continues to work for me at Beetle Press, recently started her job as a reporter at the Greenfield Recorder after graduating from the University of Massachusetts. In our next blog in two weeks, let’s hear about what Shelby’s work is like and what she is learning!