Go ahead; seize the day

Monday at noon, I sat in a circle with a group of high school students and told them about how to make it in newspapers.

It sounded like a daunting task. I had come to the school as a replacement for my former editor, Tony Dodero, who recently took the reins of the Times Community News Web pages. Not only does Tony have more career experience than I do, but he also teaches a journalism class at Orange Coast College.

I ended up at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, surrounded by five other professional mentors and a dozen students from Newport Harbor High School. For the first 10 minutes or so, I felt in over my head. One of the other mentors had been a writer for 26 years; that’s how long I’ve been alive.

Almost before I knew it, the students had to return to class. But as the hour passed quickly, I realized that I could tell a young journalist quite a bit. Next April will mark my 10th anniversary as a reporter -- and yes, I really do consider high school an important part of a writer’s career. It was an invaluable part of mine.

I published my first article in April 1996, at the end of my sophomore year at Sonora High School in La Habra. Our school paper had an imaginative name -- Carpe Diem, chosen by an English teacher who adored the movie “Dead Poets Society” -- but unfortunately, the paper itself was far less dazzling. When I joined the staff that year, the editors still put the paper together with glue and scissors, which resulted in a lot of dark photos and diagonally tilted lines.

The worst part of working for the paper was that as far as I could tell, nobody read it. Every few weeks, the newspaper staff would deposit stacks of Carpe Diems on the floors of classrooms; within 10 minutes, most of them had been converted into paper airplanes or wadded into impromptu basketballs.

But whatever the technical problems, our staff had one thing: inspiration. And so, when my junior year began, the advisor and editors began to shape Carpe Diem into a winner. Out went the cut-and-paste boards and in came computers; out went dull stories about the talent show and in came longer profiles of teachers and staff. We expanded the paper from tabloid size to professional daily size, adding a catchy masthead with pillars and ivy.

The moment of truth came the day we released our first paper of the fall: I walked into my English class and found people sitting at their desks reading Carpe Diem.

It only got better from there. My senior year, I was the assistant editor, sports editor and film critic for the paper -- and the last turned out to be my career break. A month or two before graduating, I won a high school journalism contest sponsored by the Times Orange County, finishing first in critical review for my analysis of “Wag the Dog.”

That summer, while I was doing my laundry, the editor of the Times Calendar section called and asked if I would like to work for them 20 hours a week. I stammered, “Yes,” then poured in the fabric softener.

Since then, I have worked for the Pictorial Gazette in Connecticut, earned a master’s degree in creative writing, and spent the last nine months covering education for the Daily Pilot. That still doesn’t make me Tony Dodero, especially in terms of salary. But what advice could I give to someone who was just starting out?

Well, before anything else, I would say to be an ideas person. Explore your school and come to meetings brimming with ideas. It doesn’t matter if all of them don’t work. That’s what editors are for. But you also shouldn’t spend your time waiting for your editors to tell you what to write.

Does your paper lack an advice column or a pop music section? Suggest one. Could the student life page use a snappier layout? Bring in some clip art. Are there students at your school whose relatives survived the Holocaust? Round them up and write a long feature story.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should get cocky. My senior year, one of our staffers penned an editorial in which he compared a syllabus to a body cavity search, and he also wrote that it was nice to be back in school because “we were all starting to miss watching the football team lose.” I won’t even describe the trouble we got in for that; suffice it to say that in the next issue, we ran a retraction in 20-point font.

But as long as you can stave off death threats, journalism -- whether in high school or at the New York Times -- is a wonderful place to expand your interests and capabilities. So, student journalists, don’t approach your work as if it’s “only” a school paper. Never tell yourself that once you move to a major daily, you’ll start really strutting your stuff.

That first break often comes when you least expect it. So give your current assignment your best, and keep a phone handy by the washing machine.