journalism

The Strangest First Day on the Job I Ever Had

June 3, 2026 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

I felt more than a little apprehension. I was in morning rush hour traffic, driving to downtown St. Louis from the close-in suburb where I lived. It was something of a new experience. I hadn’t driven in rush-hour traffic since leaving Houston 25 years earlier. The apprehension wasn’t about traffic; I had stepped outside my career experience and accepted a job with St. Louis Public Schools. And I was early; the hours were 8 to 5, but I decided to be there by 7:30.

Except for nine months at a newspaper straight out of college, my career had been exclusively corporate communications: employee communications, crisis communications, media relations, environmental communications, and speechwriting. Especially speechwriting. Even for the three years I had had my own consulting business, I worked for companies, doing mostly speechwriting.

Corporations have their moments of craziness and crisis, but they pale in comparison to urban school districts. And yet, here I was, driving to my first day on the job at the largest school district in the state of Missouri, a district that had been in crisis for years and was now in hyper-crisis.

An outside management team has been authorized to take over and try to fix the massive problems the district faced – financial, academic, structural. The management team had been tasked with smashing an entrenched bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy – and all the outside people supporting it – was fighting back.

I was allowing myself to walk right into it. I’d already had the strangest job interview I’d ever had, and now I would have the strangest first day on the job I’d ever had.

*Photograph by Charles Deluvio via Unsplash*.

I parked in the district’s garage, a short walk across a plaza from the headquarters building. I followed my instructions, introduced myself to the security team at the entrance, and accompanied one of the armed guards to a small room off the lobby, where I had my picture taken and badge created. Then I took the stairs to the second floor, where my office was said to be. Someone directed me toward the side of the building overlooking North 11^th Street. The office was quite nice, just like any corporate office, and with a door. It was next to my boss’s office, but she was in an offsite meeting with all the other senior officials.

The secretary told me that I was supposed to go to Human Resources to fill out the required forms, but she said there was something else I needed to do first. Channel 5 News had asked for an interview about the teachers’ sickout.

“The teachers are having a sickout?” I said.

She nodded. “I think it has to do with changes to pensions. But they say it’s not a sickout, only hat a lot of teachers have called in sick.”

I went looking for someone to give me the background and find out what the district’s response was. I found the HR department down on the first floor, but no one there admitted to knowing anything. Someone in the academic department might know something, they said. I started looking around the building. That’s when I began to see some of the changes that had arrived.

The part of the second floor near my office was empty. There were fully equipped desks in cubicles, with tape dispensers, staplers, paper, and other office supplies, but no people. This had been the 12-member communication department. Now it was me and a half-headcount I hadn’t met yet. The people in Finance couldn’t help. No one in the academic department could say anything, because the top officials were in that offsite meeting.

The third and top floor was entirely empty except for a broadcast studio; the technician told me he was glad to meet me, his new boss. No one had mentioned that I was responsible for the broadcast studio. I would shortly learn that I was also responsible for the photography studio and archives, housed in one of the schools that had been closed. I found out that day when the district’s photographer showed up in my office to meet his new boss.

Back on the second floor, I stopped by the secretary’s desk to ask a question everyone had been vague about. What was my discretionary budget? She rather cheerfully told me that it it had been close to $1 million, but that had been reduced to $20,000. “But don’t worry about it,” she said. “The $20,000 has already been spent.”

The budget was zero. My job had become even more interesting.

I finally found someone who knew about the sick-leave policy and the issue, but they would not go on the record and never in front of a camera. I would soon learn that tended to be the official position of virtually everyone who worked for the school district – people universally saw the news media as one-way tickets to dismissal. The person did say the policy was that sickouts were illegal; people participating in them were subject to dismissal. I was warned that the principals would likely protect their staff and deny anyone had called in sick. I tested that with two principals. The assessment had been correct.

As my first hour on the job ended, I walked downstairs and outside to do an interview with Channel 5. Channels 2, 4, 11, and 30 followed. Then the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis American. The St. Louis Business Journal. The Riverfront Times. Several radio stations, including two independents.

That morning, I learned that I had to help TV reporters find a different location around the building so that televised reports wouldn’t look the same. That, as part of his job covering the school district, the Post-Dispatch reporter possessed and monitored a police radio. (The Post-Dispatch building was half a block away.) That School Board members, administrators, principals, and teachers all leaked like sieves to the media, parents, critics, protestors, and anyone else who’d listen.

*Photograph by Scott Graham via Unsplash*.

In between interviews, I received my first phone call. It was from the St. Louis Mayor’s office, providing my “suggested” instructions for the day. I would discover that this would happen three or four times a week. The Mayor’s office was not connected in any official way to the school district. I suppose it’s okay to note now that I received my instructions politely and then ignored them. But I appreciated the effort.

By noon, I had a little time to go to HR and fill out my forms. I completed them in a small conference room and returned them to a secretary. It would be weeks before anyone owned up to those forms getting lost. The people involved knew the forms had been lost, but they were afraid to say anything it. I figured it out when I didn’t receive my first two paychecks.

More interviews followed. Lunch that day happened around 3 p.m. when I found a vending machine that I had to get Security to operate because there had been too many break-ins and thefts. Yes, right there in the headquarters building, presumably by people who worked there. What had been the district’s small cafeteria had been closed in one of the restructurings that had already happened.

Toward the end of the day, the secretary brought me a catalog to order office supplies. I mentioned that I’d seen the fully supplied cubicles nearby, and couldn’t I simply take some of what was there? She looked almost horrified. “But don’t you want new supplies?” she said. I said I would scavenge first, and if I needed anything else, I’d let her know. She looked at me like I was a graverobber.

By 5 p.m., I was exhausted. The administrators had all returned from the offsite meeting, and I was able to greet several of them, including the acting superintendent, the man who’d yelled at me in the interview. He had a small team of two or three people he’d brought with him; one of them would become an island of sanity in what was clearly the craziest workplace I’d ever walked into.

If I’d only known what was ahead, I might not have come back after what had been the stranngest, most hectic first day on the job I’d ever experienced.

Related:

The Strangest Job Interview I Ever Had.

Top photograph by St. Louis Public Schools.

The Journalists’ Prayer

October 30, 2024 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

St. Bride’s Church in London’s Fleet Steet is known as the “Journalists’ Church.” The church and the area around it have a long history with writers, publishing, printing, and newspapers. But it’s history – the newspapers that once occupied the buildings of Fleet Street are long gone, absorbed into other newspaper or moved to other locations.

British journalism grew up here for a simple reason: the first printing press with moveable type was brought to the area in 1500, and the printing (and later the newspaper business) grew up around it. But a church had occupied the site since about 500 A.D.; the current St. Bride’s was completely rebuilt in the late 1950s to restore what had been destroyed during the German Blitz of December 1940.

A nearby building which once housed the *Sunday Telegraph*.

The church has seen its fair share of famous purposes. Samuel Johnson lived across Fleet Street; John Milton at one time lived in the churchyard; Samuel Pepys was baptized here; the 18^th century novelist Samuel Richardson was buried here; and Charles Dickens lived for a time in the parish (we forget that Dickens started his writing career as a reporter).

On a recent visit to London, we visited St. Bride’s and its crypt during one of the two London Open House weekends. When it was restored, it was rebuilt with all its former Christopher Wren elegance. The church’s interior is simply beautiful.

The crypts below the church are another story altogether. Over the centuries, they had been forgotten and buried; they were rediscovered after the German bombing. You can see part of a Roman building foundation, a small medieval chapel; and the area where hundreds of people were buried (the nameplate for Samuel Richardson’s coffin is on display).

Placed around the church proper are various plaques, listing the names of journalists killed in World War I, World II, Iraq, and other conflicts. And many of the seats have nameplates in memory of journalists; I sat in the one bearing the name of Malcolm Muggeridge, a journalist well worth knowing about and reading.

What struck me most profoundly was a polished stone sheet bearing “The Journalists’ Prayer.” The words are attributed to St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), the patron saint of Catholic writers and journalists. While St. Bride’s directs them to journalists, the words could apply to writers in general, and more generally to anyone who works. But I read those words, and I felt the gap between them and me. The prayer is something that writers, and especially Christian writers, can aspire to.

The Journalists’ Prayer

Almighty God,
strengthen and direct, we pray,
the will of all whose work it is to write what many read,
and to speak where many listen.
May we be bold in confronting evil and injustice,
and compassionate in our understanding of human weakness,
rejecting alike the half-truth that deceives, and the slanted word that corrupts.
May the power that is ours, for good or ill,
always be used with respect and integrity;
so that when all here has been written, said, and done,
we may, unashamed, meet Thee face to face,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Related:

Footsteps at St. Bride’s.

Top photo: The Journalists’ Prayer inscribed stone in St. Bride’s Church, Fleet Street. Below, the church’s famous tiered steeple of St. Bride’s, the inspiration for wedding cakes everywhere.

The Major Lesson of Five Decades of Writing

April 3, 2024 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Looking back at five decades of writing, I can say with certainty the major lesson I’ve learned. I was reminded of it while I was reading Writing Better Fiction by Harvey Stanbrough. This is about as no-nonsense, straightforward, this-is-how-it-is discussion of writing that I’ve ever come across. And most of it applies to non-fiction as well as fiction.

In other words, I recognize what he talks about. Fully recognize it.

The major lesson: Writers write, no matter what.

You may be sick. You may have 67 other priorities and pressing demands. You may stare dully at a blank page or screen without having a single thing to put down. You may hear the chorus of constant critics, including your own internal voices. You may watch others write something seemingly effortlessly and wonder why that never happens to you. Twice a day might be tempted to pack it all in and walk away, forever.

But it still comes down to this: writers write, no matter what.

I’d like to say it gets easier, and it does, in a sense. Like anything else, the more practiced you become, the better you get at it. What’s different about writing is that every article, every story, every poem, every novel, and every book is its own singular act of creation. Which means that, each time you write, you’re doing something altogether new.

I learned this lesson early, without realizing it. I was a reporter for my college newspaper, and I had a fair number of stories already under my belt, the result of a semester and a half of reporting. The story was the University Court deciding whether a candidate for student body president had violated the election rules. The session, held a few days before the election in a room in the student union, went late into the night. The editors were (impatiently) waiting for the story; they wanted to go home. It was a big story; the candidate was the favored winner.

The comment session ended; the court retired into deliberation. It was getting close to midnight. I found a pay phone nearby (no mobile phones in those days) and called the editor who said she hoped I had most of the story already written (this would have been by hand; no laptops in those days). The court returned and announced a non-decision. The candidate was outraged and demanded a yes-or-no answer. Back into deliberation they went.

*LSU’s newspaper some 13 years before my time*

I sat in a chair in the meeting room, writing the story by hand. I guessed what they outcome was going to be, because it was clear that the candidate had indeed violated the rules. And then we all waited. For an hour. I kept tinkering and editing the story, knowing my editors were going nuts, because I still had to type the thing.

Right at 12:30 a.m., the court read its decision. I’d guessed right. I waited just a moment for the explosion from the candidate (now former candidate) and then ran (I did not walk) the roughly three blocks to the Journalism building. I shouted the decision at the editor and sat down to type like a crazy person. I’d type two paragraphs, and she’d grab the page from the typewriter as I typed the next two paragraphs.

Somehow a coherent story emerged. Nobody said thanks, or good job, or good story, or anything else. I watched the editing and the finishing of the front-page layout. I was asked to check the headline for accuracy. And then it was rushed off to the back shop six blocks away for typesetting. I also had to indicate what could be cut if space was too tight. I got back to my fraternity house (where I was living) about 2 a.m., only to discover half a dozen people waiting for me to return, because they wanted to know what the outcome had been.

Under horrendous deadline and pressure conditions, the writer wrote.

And it wouldn’t be the last time.

Top photograph by Nik Shuliahin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

When You Find Yourself in Someone Else’s Memoir

July 20, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

University of Iowa School of Journalism office int he 1920s.

I started reading the memoir Ghost of the Hardy Boys because I loved the Hardy Boys mystery books as a kid and because I knew a little of the story of how they came to be. Leslie McFarlane (1902-1977) didn’t write all of the 60 books in the series published under the name of Franklin W. Dixon, but he wrote the first third of them. McFarlane was responsible for the 22 books between The Tower Treasure in 1927 and The Phantom Freighter in 1947.

I read all 22, roughly between 1960 and 1963. I loved them. They even inspired me to write, or start to write, my own mystery. The handwritten manuscript, forever lost, was about 25 pages of a group of kids finding a secret passage from a grandfather down into a cave. I was 10 years old. Yeah, I could see the books had some old-fashioned words, like roadster and coupe for types of automobiles. But I didn’t care, even though I looked up the words in the dictionary. (If you’re interested, a coupe was a two-door car, the name borrowed from a type of horse-drawn carriage. A roadster is what we would call a convertible today.)

McFarlane published his memoir in 1975; this edition was republished this year in a format that resembles the Hardy Boys books themselves. And he tells the story of writing the book series in a highly readable and often funny way. He never thought of these books as “great literature,” but, like the Stratmeyer Syndicate’s other series, The Bobbsey Twinsand Nancy Drew, they constituted childhood reading for tens of millions of youngsters. Like me.

McFarlane’s memoir isn’t only about The Hardy Boys. He’s telling his own story, how he became a newspaperman in northern Ontario in the early 1920s and how he eventually landed in Massachusetts, at the Springfield Republican. And it was this description of (relatively) small-town journalism in 1920s that took me by surprise.

With very small changes, he could have been telling the story of small-town journalism in the 1970s. I know, because I was there for a year, my first job out of college. From 1973 to 1974, I worked as a copy editor at the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise. I found myself in McFarlane’s memoir so easily that I had to ask why. I mean, half a century separated his experience at the Republican and my experience at the Enterprise. How could they be so similar?

I think there are at least three reasons.

First, new computer technology only just started to seep into journalism in 1973, and then it was only in the backshop, where typesetters would retype the stories on computers for printing “cold type” and then pasting the stories onto pages. Reporters and editors still typed on typewriters, and layout designers still did their work by hand. No computer sat on any reporter’s or editor’s desk, simply because they didn’t exist.

Second, just like McFarlane’s experience, our primary sources of news were reporter-written or from the Associated Press or similar wire service. The newsroom had a television set, but we only watched it when there was some huge national story that was breaking. We weren’t competing against local TV stations. And social media was three decades into the future.

The stereotype of the reporter in the movies wasn’t far off from the reality.

Third, the people McFarlane worked with and for – his fellow reporters and editors – were eerily similar to the people I worked with. Like McFarlane’s experience, the older reporters and the middle and senior editors had not gone to journalism school (or even college) but either happened into journalism or somehow grown up in the business. And they were individual characters. They yelled a lot. They didn’t mind telling us how dumb we were – in front of our colleagues. Their heads held all kinds of esoteric knowledge and “background” information. And most of them were native Texans, which carried a whole additional set of eccentricities.

I don’t think I had a boring day at work the entire time I was there. Not to mention the fact that the Watergate scandal was unfolding, and I even wrote the huge front-page headline “Agnew Resigns.”

But to read Ghost of the Hardy Boys, a memoir by a favorite childhood writer, and to find myself and my own experiences, was a startling thing. I don’t think these newsrooms exist anymore. Everything is professionalized; reporters have degrees from journalism schools or similar backgrounds, not to mention advanced degrees in many cases. Despite the proliferation of individual bias into news stories today, journalism seems far less personal than it was 50 years ago.

Something’s missing in journalism today. But I’m glad to have been reminded by the writer of the Hardy Boys stories that he and I shared something important in common.

“Bad News” by Batya Ungar-Sargon

February 9, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and co-hosts Newsweek’s podcast “The Debate.” Before joining Newsweek, she was the opinion editor of Forward, the largest Jewish media outlet in the United States. She’s written for The New York Times and Washington Post. She’s appeared on MSNBC, NPR, and NBC. She has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

She is not the person you would expect to have written a book like Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. But she did.

Bad News is not a book written from a conservative, right-wing, or alt-right perspective. It’s not a hastily compiled mishmash of everything that’s wrong with the news media. Instead, Ungar-Sargon has published a carefully researched, well-documented, and well-written story of where American news media has gone seriously wrong and how that is harming the United States.

If the problem could be summarized in one sentence, it would be this: the business model of the news media has shifted from reporting the news to giving its demographic the perspective that it wants. Some call this reporting the narrative instead of the news. Whatever it’s called, it’s making a significant contribution, perhaps the most significant, to destroying trust it itself, in American Institutions, and what Americans have believed about their country. And that has implications far beyond the 50 states

This is what Ungar-Sargon documents in Bad News:

The people who are the reporters and editors have not been working-class for two generations. The economic and social status of reporters changed fundamentally, and the author points to the Watergate scandal as one of the starting points.

The major news media have abandoned the working class, not unlike the Democratic Party did beginning with the Clinton Administration. The working class is still large group of people, and Fox News isn’t so much the conservative media outlier as it is the channel that covers what the working class cares about.

Social media and the internet, far from “democratizing” society, have been the mechanisms by which the major news media centered their efforts on narrative instead of news – and turned the narrative into a business model.

The media’s coverage of racial issues fits its audience’s understanding about race and itself, but it is completely out of kilter with what most Americans believe or experience. One example: 81 percent of Black Americans do not want the police defunded. Ungar-Sargon argues that the media is besotted with race because a discussion of class, which she sees is the real issue, would undermine the media’s own position.

The media’s cartoonish coverage of Jews, crime, and Trump voters exemplify what is happening. She doesn’t say it exactly this way, but Donald Trump is like the drug to the news media’s addiction. It needs Trump, and not only to prop up its ratings and subscriptions but also to be the ever-present Bogeyman out to destroy America as the media understands it.

She doesn’t present a laundry list of how to fix the problem; the solution will take generations. But she does suggest things that Americans can do to stop the media from exercising the negative influence it has. And it’s not things like cancel your newspaper subscription.

Bad News is an important book, one likely to be ignored by the news media. But the rest of need to read it and understand it. It’s that important.

When Journalism Began to Change

When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel – and a Mystery

How Email Started a Revolution

The Media and Kyle Rittenhouse

The U.S. Media and Russian Collusion

Top photograph by Markus Spiske via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Convergence of Social Media and Big Media

January 26, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

A work colleague in a Latin American country sent an email, asking for help. A manufacturing plant had been proposed, and while most people wanted it, a small number of radical environmentalists did not. There had been protests, road blockades, and rallies. And then, when it appeared that both the company and the authorities were going ahead, the ante was raised.

Using anonymous Twitter accounts, the protestors targeted the company’s spokesman. Scores of people were tweeting. A bounty was placed on the spokesman head — $5000 US was being offered for the spokesman dead or alive. And the tweets included his home address. Stripes were published in the local media.

I was asked to contact Twitter, which I did immediately. Then, as now, Twitter and the other social media giants were difficult to reach. They were, and are, all about communication, except when you needed to communicate with them. The company spokesman and his family went into hiding. Twitter responded two days after being contacted. The tweets, Twitter said, did not violate their community standards and would remain.

Think about that for a moment. A US-based company was allowing its platform to be used to threaten and possibly accomplish violence against an individual.

I should mention this happened in 2014. This continued to be Twitter’s policy until about a year later, when its founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, received a death threat. On Twitter. Overnight, death threats were deemed violations of community standards. It’s amazing how that works.

In a very short period of time, roughly five or six years, social media had gone from the “great democratic experiment to give power to everyone” to something darker, more threatening, and more dangerous. The first few years had been something almost euphoric; very few people today would say anything about social media is euphoric. We’ve seen its ugly side, and we’ve seen it over and over again. Today it’s called cancel culture.

But it’s more insidious that people ganging up on someone online. What is worrisome is that it’s becoming embedded as policy with the social media giants. The concern, usually expressed by conservatives, is that a progressive / leftist mentality guides the social media platforms when they determine what’s true, what’s false, what is “missing context,” and what’s “fake news.” The Wall Street Journal took a look and determined that left-wing factcheckers were controlling the discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic. A lawsuit by conservative journalist against Facebook brought forth a really curious statement in Facebook’s court filings – that its factchecking was nothing more than opinion. I wouldn’t call that the best defense.

In general, Big Media is comfortable with the factchecking done by the social media platforms. That’s no surprise if Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others are aligned with your own narrative and view of the world.

Consider what happened with the Covington Kids in January 2019. The power of big media and social media converged to destroy a bunch of teenaged boys whom they believed epitomized the prevailing media narrative. As The Atlantic pointed out, the media botched the story, and the damage to their credibility has been lasting. Not to mention costly. On that Friday and Saturday, I sat horrified while I watched online friends on Facebook and Twitter hysterically embrace the role of lynch mob.

Social media are powerful and influential. According to Pew Research, more than half of the people on Twitter get their news from that platform. For Facebook, the number has been declining to slightly less than a third. My own experience has been to stop considering Twitter as a source for hard or political news and discount most of what I see labeled as news on Facebook. I follow virtually no news accounts on Instagram or MeWe.

We have to learn how to assert, or reassert, some control over what is called news.