Woodstock Sentinel Review - reporter
The big advantage of being groomed as a reporter in the 1960's was the abundance of newspapers in small towns willing to hire you on the spot. One phone call from Brampton's Bill Doole and I was on my way to this London-area town.
With a whole six months of daily and weekly experience under my belt, here I was at a larger daily newspaper, making slightly more money and with still so much to learn about reporting, photography and style.
While my lack of a high school or university degree was a drawback as a reporter, I discovered that asking numerous questions to gain the knowledge of a subject was more beneficial than thinking I knew it all and not asking as many questions.
Literally, almost every assignment was a classroom and all of the people being interviewed were my teachers. People who said I was a good listener did not know I wasn't talking much because I had little knowledge of the topic being discussed.
Faking my way through interviews was frustrating at times, especially when it came to politics. On my first day as a cub reporter in Chatham, I did not know the three levels of government. Picture not knowing that in daily discussions today.
Fellow reporters in Woodstock included Tim Foley, who would move on to the CBC and the Toronto Star before becoming an Anglican Church priest with a pulpit on Bloor St. W. He was helpful in getting me settled into the daily newspaper routine again.
One timely lesson learned in Woodstock was do not rely on a reel-to-reel tape recorder for a lengthy interview. It took forever to start, stop, rewind, start, stop, rewind to complete the feature story. It was back to scribbling notes and hoping for the best when it came to read them.
My sister, Carolyn, was a Pitman-trained legal secretary and she suggested taking a shorthand course. Just couldn't conquer it, so I developed my own shorthand, using phonetic spellings and abbreviations. It served me well, along with years of perfecting poke and hunt two-finger typing.
In February of 1964, the Sentinel Review introduced a Teen Time section and the boss said talk to folks about this new British rock band called the Beatles. Red Young, a local music store manager, said the demand for Beatles records was hot and heavy.
The lead of my story read something like "local teens are running, not walking to the music store to buy Beatles records." Young said it was the start of something big in the music business and how right he was.
When not partying into the wee hours after work, I was hunched over my typewriter writing and rewriting stories wanting them to be perfect. The late hours and missing the 9 a.m. starting time once too often brought out the Donald Trump in my boss.
"We have to let you go," he said, noting my tawdry starting times. That was less traumatic than "you're fired," but the end result was the same. I was jobless in Woodstock.
But Thomson newspapers being Thomson newspapers, it was only a matter of weeks before the Oakville Journal Record, another daily newspaper, hired me. Love those Thomson guys.
Next blog: Oakville Journal Record- reporter
The big advantage of being groomed as a reporter in the 1960's was the abundance of newspapers in small towns willing to hire you on the spot. One phone call from Brampton's Bill Doole and I was on my way to this London-area town.
With a whole six months of daily and weekly experience under my belt, here I was at a larger daily newspaper, making slightly more money and with still so much to learn about reporting, photography and style.
While my lack of a high school or university degree was a drawback as a reporter, I discovered that asking numerous questions to gain the knowledge of a subject was more beneficial than thinking I knew it all and not asking as many questions.
Literally, almost every assignment was a classroom and all of the people being interviewed were my teachers. People who said I was a good listener did not know I wasn't talking much because I had little knowledge of the topic being discussed.
Faking my way through interviews was frustrating at times, especially when it came to politics. On my first day as a cub reporter in Chatham, I did not know the three levels of government. Picture not knowing that in daily discussions today.
Fellow reporters in Woodstock included Tim Foley, who would move on to the CBC and the Toronto Star before becoming an Anglican Church priest with a pulpit on Bloor St. W. He was helpful in getting me settled into the daily newspaper routine again.
One timely lesson learned in Woodstock was do not rely on a reel-to-reel tape recorder for a lengthy interview. It took forever to start, stop, rewind, start, stop, rewind to complete the feature story. It was back to scribbling notes and hoping for the best when it came to read them.
My sister, Carolyn, was a Pitman-trained legal secretary and she suggested taking a shorthand course. Just couldn't conquer it, so I developed my own shorthand, using phonetic spellings and abbreviations. It served me well, along with years of perfecting poke and hunt two-finger typing.
In February of 1964, the Sentinel Review introduced a Teen Time section and the boss said talk to folks about this new British rock band called the Beatles. Red Young, a local music store manager, said the demand for Beatles records was hot and heavy.
The lead of my story read something like "local teens are running, not walking to the music store to buy Beatles records." Young said it was the start of something big in the music business and how right he was.
When not partying into the wee hours after work, I was hunched over my typewriter writing and rewriting stories wanting them to be perfect. The late hours and missing the 9 a.m. starting time once too often brought out the Donald Trump in my boss.
"We have to let you go," he said, noting my tawdry starting times. That was less traumatic than "you're fired," but the end result was the same. I was jobless in Woodstock.
But Thomson newspapers being Thomson newspapers, it was only a matter of weeks before the Oakville Journal Record, another daily newspaper, hired me. Love those Thomson guys.
Next blog: Oakville Journal Record- reporter
posted by John Cosway | 7:28 p.m.
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