since it was requested...

[offbalance]

Ronald R. Shafer Memorial Fund Scholarship Essay

In order to prepare my entry for this award, I found myself sitting cross-legged on my living room floor, looking through a box full of newspapers. I was trying to find the best set of clips to represent the last few years in my journalism career, and found myself immersed in old copies of the Albany Student Press, reminiscing. It's amazing what you can learn in just four short years.

I fell in love with journalism a few years before I came to the University at Albany, after joining my high school newspaper. During those years I first became enamored of the beautiful simplicity of the style, and did my best to learn everything I could about it. This was a style of writing almost like I had never seen before; simple, direct, but with room to be extremely creative. I thought I had a pretty good handle on things when I arrived here at the university, but I was still interested in learning even more. I was disappointed when I found out I couldn't take any journalism classes until I was sophomore, but I soon discovered what I hoped might fill the void.

My first week on campus, I saw a flyer for a general interest meeting for the ASP. It was a perfect match: they were looking for writers, I was looking to write. I walked in the door expecting some sort of screening process, and walked out with two story assignments. My first semester I was working on both news and arts & entertainment stories as a staff writer, and having a ball. I was doing so well as a writer that at the end of my first semester, I was offered the position of Arts & Entertainment Editor, which I gleefully accepted. I held that post for a year and a half, until I was promoted to News Editor. At the time of my promotion, A&E had become the biggest section of the paper - ballooning from 2 pages and a staff of 5 writers to 8 pages and a staff of 12 under my direction. I was given the news section in the hopes that I could do the same for it.

After a backbreaking year covering the news, I decided to retire. My job had become too management-oriented. I wrote a grand total of three articles during my tenure as News Editor, simply because I was too busy hassling my writers to get their stories in, and editing whatever it was that they did manage to give me, to spend a moment doing that which I love best - writing. I was getting fed up, and needed a change. Almost three years of pouring my blood, sweat and tears into the paper had drained me of patience and creativity, the two most important tools for an editor or reporter to have. Worried that I'd burn out before ever getting a chance to play for the majors, I took on the entirely new task of columnist for a change of pace and to force my writing muscles back into the kind of shape they had been in before.

When I began taking journalism classes here at U Albany, I already had been an editor at the ASP for a semester. My professors were mostly professionals, so they not only respected the fact that I might have learned something from my job, they often would ask me to relate an experience to the class as a practical example. The best part about learning from people who still worked in the field is that they never preached at you. I had many professors, for other kinds of writing outside of the journalism department, that usually treated their classes as a way to deliver their beliefs down from on high. My journalism professors were more concerned about us learning as much as we could in the time we had. I didn't just learn about writing articles and getting proper quotes, although those were important elements. My journalism classes at the University at Albany also taught me a great deal about developing a distinctive style, how to be direct with my sentences and economical with my words. Possibly the most important thing I learned was the sanctity of the deadline, unfortunately, some of my staff writers at the time still were not able to wrap their minds around that concept. I fine-tuned my writing skills in the journalism program, and now feel confident that what I have learned will stand me in good stead in the job market. The professors I had also provided some valuable career advice . I got to learn about fields that were related to journalism that were directly tied to a newspaper, such as Public Relations. They encouraged me to diversify my experience as much as I could, in order to become marketable. Following their advice, I now consider myself to be a media triple threat, and have experience in newspapers, book publishing, and public relations.

The hardest thing I've had to deal with is people who don't consider my time on the ASP to be 'real' newspaper experience. While I understand that I wasn't exactly working for The New York Times, we all took our jobs on the paper seriously. The editorial staff I worked with during my years on the ASP were all there because they loved what they were doing, and worked as hard as they could to do it well. We didn't have an advisor. We didn't get funding from any university department. Every issue that we put out, we did by ourselves, and getting that issue out by Friday was our top priority. We were the ones begging and hassling our writers tor turn stories in on time, and trying every method in the book to keep our ancient computers running just long enough to crank out just one more issue. I still get angry when I think of how it felt to come off a week of almost no sleep and non-stop stress to get the paper out, only to have someone who hadn't even so much as written as story for us announce to me how much the ASP 'sucked.' We weren't perfect, but we were doing something. I came away from my experience with more practical experience than I could have gotten anywhere else because of that newspaper. Yes, we made mistakes, but we did learn from them, and tried our best not to repeat them.
In the three years I spent as an editor for the ASP, I learned just how difficult putting out a newspaper could be. At the time, all I could think of was the means to the end, getting enough good content into my section (with sufficient pictures) to meet my requirements for the week. I remember commiserating with my colleagues about how that week was worse than the one before it, and the complaining that went along with all of it. But what I will remember most of all is the good times we had putting the paper to bed every Thursday night; the jokes, the fight over which radio station to listen to and the oily slices of pizza that stayed at the bottom of your stomach for the remainder of the weekend. Those warm memories will always have a place in my thoughts, right along with the harsh, cold realities of flaky writers, impossible stories that needed to be covered, getting by on less than 3 hours of sleep a night, flaring tempers and more stress than I could deal with most of the time. My friends would ask me (in the rare moments that I would see them during weeks when the paper was in production) why I was putting myself through this. I only had one very simple answer: I loved it. Loved it. I ate, slept, breathed and relished my job, good or bad, every minute of the day.

There's this intense feeling (call it a buzz, if you will) that I get when I see my name in print, or when I introduce myself to someone and find out that they know me from my articles I've done in the past. I'd get it when I'd look over the page proofs for my section, seeing how all of the stories I'd worked on had become interesting and informative, especially when they had been handed in as an unintelligible mess. I feel this rush of excitement when I get a lead on a good story, and feel it all begin to come together, or I have a great idea for a column, and all the words flow from my fingertips without one bit of effort. That's why, no matter what career I may end up paying for my expenses with, I'll always have a place for journalistic writing in my life. I simply love it.