>> Okay, this is a career that you can't fake.
You have to be able to too the job, you have to be able to write,
you have to be able to write on a deadline.
And that comes from practice and practice and practice.
Daily journalism is a wonderful, teachable skill, but it only evolves
by doing it every single day and trying to find
out what you're doing wrong the first time and improve on it.
So it's not something that you can learn by reading a book.
You have to actually get out in the world and actually interview people,
get their information, and be able to turn around and write it
in a concise and coherent fashion.
The best thing I can tell people is that they have to just go do it.
It's the only way you can learn it.
Well, I went to the journalism school of the Michigan State University.
And so much of my career in college was spent focused on trying
to develop my writing and reporting skills.
We had a publishing requirement, every ten weeks you had to publish a hundred column inches
in the newspaper or a magazine, a requirement of the class.
So that forced you very early on into the -- into that atmosphere.
Then several years later I was teaching at Temple University,
and as I was preparing my course I really thought about what I had graduated
from journalism school and what I didn't know.
There were things that I shaped the class around, for instance,
the ability to dictate a story through a paragraph off the top of your head.
Something I did not know how to do when I graduated college
but I was required to do on my first job.
I had to go to the scene of a crime and pick up a pay phone and dictate the story off the top
of my head to someone at the other end at a typewriter.
So things like that, the practical side of it, and those sort of things that I tried
to fashion my class at Temple University around.
Things that I hadn't learned in journalism school.
So just a lot of it is self confidence, a lot of it is ability to talk
up to strangers and ask them hard questions.
You don't get over that once you do.