Forty-five years in this business. The first thing I covered was a ribbon cutting at a savings and loan in Indianapolis. The last column I wrote before this one was about the architecture of a congressional hearing on something that no longer matters, which is the architecture of most congressional hearings. The distance between those two assignments is the education.
Started at a daily paper in Indiana in 1981, covering everything young reporters cover: zoning disputes, state fairs, elections where the candidates were not worth caring about. Learned early that covering something is not the same as making it matter. Moved to Washington in 1988. Nine years at a major daily there. Congress for four of them. Two presidential campaigns. A national journalism award for a series on water infrastructure in rural Indiana and Ohio that nobody in Washington cared about except the people whose water it was.
Left Washington in 1997. Not from failure. From something more like accurate reading of the situation. Spent fourteen years writing a weekly column for a regional paper in Cincinnati. September 11. The financial crisis. Two wars. The particular exhaustion of a mid-size American city working through deindustrialization and opioids while the national press summarized it in statistics. I described it in the faces of specific people at specific tables in specific diners, which is the only journalism I know how to do.
The column is what I am built for. The obligation of a deadline. The discipline of showing up once a week and making sense of the noise for people who do not have time to do it themselves. The Sunday Evening Review is the right place for that work and Dale Parsons is the right editor to do it with.
Live in Cincinnati with Karen, my wife of forty-one years, who is a retired court reporter and the sharpest person I know. Two children. Two grandchildren who call me Pop, which I take seriously. A study in a state of permanent emergency that I understand completely and no one else does.
Read three newspapers in print every morning. Argue with them in the margins. Have a beer most evenings. Consider this a reasonable arrangement.