Ambitions Are All in How We Perceive Them

At the recent college reunion, my old dorm-mate, Ken, said one thing to me that stood out: “I had bigger ambitions for my career.”

Ken works for a small daily newspaper in Arizona. He has written a few big stories and won a few state awards for his reporting. Nonetheless, he feels a hollow sense of accomplishment in his career. Ken also says that things at his sheet aren’t looking good and he fears the future.

To me it is a shame to fear the future. I’ve been there but not at this point in my life.

I face an uncertain future even now but not with fear.

Certainly, my journalism career didn't end up as I had hoped while still a starry eyed college student. Quite a number of my college classmates went on to very illustrious careers with some major publications. Yet, there were many like Ken and me who never got close to our lofty ambitions.

I started my career after college at a small weekly newspaper with a news staff of two. We did everything – the reporting, writing, photography, editing, layout and even paste-up.

A few months later I landed a job at a small daily newspaper in Orange County, CA. Before six months had passed I had the flagship beat and held it for a few years.

My city editor, Stan, was extremely old school – he had worked for the Los Angeles Hearld Examiner when William Randolph Hearst was still alive and kept his hand on things at his publications. He held us mesmerized with his stories of those old days in journalism.

I feel privileged that he was my first city editor and remember him fondly.

Stan and I worked well together and he called me a “double-threat man.” It was an old newspaper term for a combination reporter and photographer. That was my thing, I was as much a newspaper reporter as I was a photojournalist. "Double-threat man" was a moniker I took seriously and wore proudly.

Later I moved to the East Coast and worked as a reporter, photographer and managing editor of a small daily just outside of Washington, D.C. Again, I had an old school editor who used the same term to describe me: a "double-threat man."

I lost the moniker when I started working for a daily national education newsletter. The sheet didn't run photos.

George H.W. Bush had declared himself “the education President” just before I started with the newsletter.

I had the elementary-secondary education beat – it turned out to be the most important beat on the newsletter. I spent a lot of time hounding Education Secretary Laurel Cavazos and his ultimate replacement Lamar Alexander.

Those were heady times. The National Governor’s Association worked with President Bush to develop six national education goals for our nation’s schools and students – goals that I’m sure hardly anyone remembers.

At that time the NGA took it upon themselves to figure out how to meet those goals. It was a state's rights issue. They didn't want the federal government dictating education policy on a state and local level.

For me, that meant part of my job was to cover the NGA as well as the White House, Congress and the state school chiefs/superintendents as all wrestled with how to achieve those unremembered goals and improve elementary and secondary education in this country. At the time, the NGA’s Education Committee was chaired by Gov. Carroll Campbell (South Carolina) and Gov. Bill Clinton (Arkansas).

While I wasn’t working for one of the major mainstream newspapers, I still felt that my career was finally about covering issues and events that were important to the future of the country.

I worked long and hard hours covering my beat. It paid off with breaking some major stories and with some recognition from education associations and journalism peers in the form of national awards for my reporting. These were not mainstream awards, like a Pultizer Prize, but were still highly regarded in education journalism circles.

To digress, while in college one of my reporting icons was David Broder, a syndicated political columnist for The Washington Post. He was like a God to me. I remember while in college saying that I wanted to be David Broder.

While I prized the awards that recognized my reporting there was one bit of recognition that it turned out was more meaningful than any plaque or certificate.

The NGA holds a couple of major conferences every year. One is always in Washington, D.C. The other is held in more neutral political territory.

In an attempt to wrap up work on the national education goals, the NGA picked Mobile, AL, to finalize and issue their strategies for achieving those six goals.

The NGA staff, working with members of the NGA’s Education Committee, developed a working paper outlining those strategies. In the days leading up to the Mobile conference my job was to get my hands on a draft of that working paper.

I burned up the phone lines talking with everyone I knew from committee members, their staff, and particularly state school chiefs/supervisors. Those were the players whom I knew would have access to that document.

It took a few days but I hit pay-dirt and convinced someone who had the draft to fax me a copy.

We broke the story on the first day of the Mobile conference and made sure that copies of our newsletter were widely available at the conference. No one else had the story.

I walked into the opening news conference at the Mobile meeting and saw that practically every reporter had a copy of our familiar blue-colored newsletter. The biggest surprise to me was to see David Broder reading my story and jotting down careful notes.

It also was clear to me that Broder’s questions during the news conference seemed to be based upon information from my story.

I got a chance to meet him shortly after the news conference. He complimented me on my story and particularly for having gotten a copy of the draft paper ahead of everyone else. He even asked me to play tennis with him. Too bad that I don’t play tennis and had to decline.

I don’t look back upon my journalism career as less than I had once hoped. I feel fulfilled by it. I found that dreams and aspirations are really all a matter of perspective.

While I may not have accomplished some of the loftier goals that I dreamed of while a college student, I did accomplish some great things in that career that I can look upon with great pride.

I also gained the acknowledgment and admiration of someone I had revered.

One other thing changed for me too. While I still held him in high regard, I no longer wanted to be David Broder. I found that I really wanted to be myself

Overall, to me, the most important accomplishment of my journalism career was finding that I could be me and do something worthwhile in society.

That has nothing to do with working for a major news organization or gathering prizes and awards or even gaining the acknowledgment of a long admired icon.

Frankly, I think I achieved that quite admirably and it is the greater accomplishment.