Nearing the end

As I enter my last week as a professional television news photojournalist, I’m getting a bit contemplative. I keep looking back at the last 19 years with just a bit of nostalgia…ok, maybe a bit more than “just a bit”.

I remember my first day working in a television newsroom. October 17, 1988. I was a senior in college, and Dr. Schock got me a job at WWMT (oops, I meant to type WWTV.   Stupid call letters((Thanks, Steve, for pointing that out.)) in Cadillac, Michigan, better known as the Great White North (summer is three weeks of bad sledding!). I would spend five hours a day, in the evenings, five days a week essentially interning (although getting paid) at the station, after a day of higher learning at college.

My first day, and many days thereafter, was spent recording and logging the evening feed from CBS. In those days, it was easier to have someone sit in front of the record deck and log what was on the feed. This did a couple of things. It gave the anchors/producers an idea of what was actually fed from the network, where on the tape the stories could be found, and showed me what professional video should look like. Well, for the most part…there was (and still is) some really bad video on the network feeds.

After the feed ended on that first day, the anchor, Kathy Pulaski (I think…it was nineteen years ago) showed me what needed to be done, which meant that day I just followed her around like a lost puppy. Eventually, I learned how to edit the videotape (I did editing in college, but honed the skill there), how to write stories, and essentially how to produce the newscast. The hard part was after taking classes, I would drive an hour to Cadillac, be at the tv station by 445pm, work five hours, drive an hour back to Mt. Pleasant, go to bed and repeat. I don’t remember a lot from the last year at school…I was tired!!!

I look back on that first day, about three lifetimes ago, and wonder what it was about this business that sucked me in. There’s a lot of things I could say grabbed my interest, but I think the thing that really grabbed me was the camaraderie of the newsroom, the sense of belonging. We were for the most part young kids just getting started, learning the business together, living in a town with not a lot of stuff to do. Suffering together, we hung together, sharing our misery, our accomplishments, whatever.

I look back, and realize I miss those days…even though I know I wouldn’t want to relive them.