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I'm a writer in the wonderful (if not necessarily lucrative) position of being able to write entirely about a topic that I love. But I've been working occasionally with a man who was a career newspaper journalist and is now a corporate writer, and the insights he's given me into the world of newspaper writing have been disillusioning at best. Fortunately, he's not the only model, but some of the arrogant letter writers here bring him to mind. "John" remembers most about the first Earth Day in 1970 that "all of us reporters" laughed at the ridiculousness of the event and the people who were involved. He and "all of us reporters" would sit in a bar at the end of the day or week and laugh at the hunters and anti-hunters that they'd written about, the people belonging to unions and management both, the politicians and people who got involved in political campaigns and all the people involved in this or that movement. They'd laugh at people who lied to them and at people who were too sincere. It sounds like Jack and his buddies laughed at everyone, no matter what station in life, no matter what the story. Based on the stories Jack has told me, he and his fellow reporters put themselves in a separate universe from the people they reported on.
He revels in his ability to ask the tough questions, but somehow he apparently never got around to asking the easy ones--the ones that would have revealed both to his readers and to himself the essential humanity of his interviewees. Perhaps, had he been more interested in asking some of those easy questions, he'd have had the kind of insights that would have elevated his writing beyond that of a cynical hack, and he'd have finally gotten the recognition that he thinks he deserved but never got.
The paper he wrote for is mediocre at best, but cynicism and an ability to run in, ask an accident victim a few curt questions and run off to meet a deadline doesn't make a good newspaper writer. You sound like a human being who can write. And so if you decide that journalism really is for you, your writing will be informed by that humanity, and your readers will be lucky indeed.
