If you would have said to me five years ago that you envisioned me someday penning my own blog, I would have laughed aloud and fallen back on the adage that a solid print journalist has no business injecting opinion into a story, unless one is crafting an editorial or an expressly labeled opinion piece.
Well, times change, and so does journalism.
I’ve spent nearly four decades as a print journalist, not counting three years as a college radio reporter, and am particularly proud to have written for newspapers that embraced the honesty and integrity of good, honest writing and reporting and stood behind all the news fit to print. Yet these are changing times, and with downsizing and reorganizing, today’s newspapers are far different from those I knew early in my career.
It seems that more and more, the lines have blurred between what is news and entertainment.
“Online” has surpassed the term “in print” and the newsrooms I came of age in where noted, good-natured voices expressed their opinions and exasperation aloud amid the clatter of typewriter keys are no more, replaced by banks of desks, solemn souls entranced by computer screens and scrolling screen teasers.
I promised myself that the moment I felt that I was becoming a cynic, I would leave journalism behind me. And while I’m not a cynic now, the time has come to write, and write well on my own terms.
So, dear friends and dear readers, welcome to my blog, “Writer’s Ramblings” on my just-launched website. Enjoy the writings, the ramblings, the sentiments and the joy of creative expression throughout the site.
A special, heartfelt thanks to my family and friends who have supported my efforts to reinvent myself as a writer and now as a novelist.
For now I’ll leave you with three thoughts, all of which have carried me well over the years:
“Good journalism is nothing more that literature in a hurry.” Unknown
“Good writing? Hell, there’s nothing to it. All you have to do is sit down at your typewriter and bleed.” Ernest Hemingway
“I hate writing but I love to have written.” Dorothy Parker
Writer's Ramblings 