In fourth grade, to Sister Clarita at St. Raphael's Elementary School, I announced I would be a writer. Had I known about jobs with more status and better pay, I might have announced my intention to become a chief financial officer of a reality television network, but c'est la vie.
I attended journalism school in the immediate post-Watergate age, at a historic moment when young journalists not only thought their jobs were to save the world, but believed that task could actually be accomplished. There was a passion and fire about breaking important public policy stories and a conviction that journalism was a tool for justice and social accord. It was a heady time. Students were hired by newspapers and magazines right out of writing courses, before they even graduated.
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