Newspaper Columnist Interview by Ruth Paget
When I started high school, I attended a private Friends School in Detroit (Michigan) to learn about my Quaker ancestors from New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The Friends School taught standard high school subjects as well as electives such as non-violence workshop where we read the works of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, non-violent games that promoted happiness for all such as caring for an egg for a week, meditation and journaling for conflict resolution, and the World of Work for vocational training.
For World of Work, we began our studies by reading Working by Chicago writer Studs Terkel, who interviewed people from all sorts of jobs about job satisfaction and the skills needed to perform the job.
We all took the Myers-Briggs Interest Inventory, which tests on which kinds of jobs you are suited for based on your interests and skills.
I wanted to be a writer, but my quantitative skills came out first and writing second. The best job for me was accountant. I was mortified!
However, my Quaker teacher told me, “Just use math when you write.”
After the Myers-Briggs Interest Inventory, I set up informational interviews to find out about the world for work for jobs I would like and those that used a lot of math. I found some of my interview write-ups recently and think much is still relevant today. I have left the interviews in most of my ninth-grade English. One of my first interviews was with Detroit Free Press columnist JF:
JF likes his job. He says it is fun to be making a living doing something you like. He finds ideas for his columns everywhere. His is constantly taking notes and reads a lot. JF works in the city room at the Detroit Free Press.
He spends 25 hours a week typing his column. JF said he is actually working all the time. When he thinks of an idea while he is sleeping, he gets up and immediately writes it down.
Before coming to the Free Press, he worked on a weekly newspaper – the Lapeer County Press. He worked there for 25 years. The last 15 years, he was the editor.
JF was an advertising salesman when he got out of college. He wrote a column for the paper entitled “My Customers.” Gradually, it became a general interest column. Eventually, he became a reporter and, then, editor. JF still continued to write his column while he was editor. Other papers caught on to his column. He was at one time in all the weeklies in Michigan.
Through the years, the Free Press made him several offers while he was editor. Finally, he decided it was time to make the change and went to work at the Free Press. I was interested in what an editor does, so I asked more about this subject. An editor works 50 to 60 hours a week. It is a time consuming and boring job. The editor takes care of the day-by-day business of running a newspaper. (I thought he was being sarcastic.)
The Lapeer County Press had 10 people working at it. You only needed the editor to run the newspaper. A newspaper the size of the Free Press has many assistant editors and department editors. It is more fragmented.
JF wanted to write since high school. There was no doubt in his mind about what he was going to do. He majored in journalism at Michigan State University. He learned more on the job than he did at school.
JF says he hits dry spells when he just cannot write. It is all a matter of being a professional. You just write your column. It just takes longer. He turns his columns in early to avoid deadline pressure.
If JF were not a columnist, he would be in some field of writing. If writing were ruled out, he would probably be a postman. In his free time, JF and his wife go to restaurants, nightclubs, movies, and live theater.
Note: I was one of JF’s regular column readers. He was one of Detroit’s men-about-town. I learned from him how important it is to create a town for yourself to support your life needs and lifestyle in a large city like Detroit.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
