COLUMN: End of summer break prompts reflection

It feels like summer is ending earlier every year, even as scorching temperatures don’t begin relenting until mid-October. Some districts began the 2024-25 school year last week, while Bibb County Schools started Monday. My nephews and niece back in Texas began last Wednesday (it was the first day of pre-K for my youngest nephew and namesake, little C.J. Slinkard. His backpack was about as big as he is).

The Melody’s office is in Mercer Village in the Reg Murphy Center for Collaborative Journalism. We share the first floor with CCJ staff and  university journalism and film studies professors, while the floors above house apartments for college students. The procession of plastic laundry hampers, suitcases and garbage bags doubling as suitcases will begin this week as students move in for the fall semester.

Move-in Day always reminds me of my first semester at college. I attended Texas A&M University-Commerce (the once East Texas State) and, unlike many of my peers, I knew what I wanted to do: work in print journalism.

I had begun working for the marketing communications department the previous summer, writing for the alumni magazine and cranking out dozens of press releases (this is where I learned AP Style, thanks to the relentless edits of my supervisor Ashley Johnson). 

But that was public relations. I wanted to do actual journalism. That meant writing for the school newspaper, the now defunct East Texan. I walked into the East Texan office, past adviser Fred Stewart and into what would soon become my home away from home. 

A tall, tattooed and bespectacled editor (there were three managing editors that semester for the East Texan, a failed triumvirate experiment that to my knowledge was never attempted again) looked at me over his white eMac and gave me my first beat assignment: covering A&M-Commerce cross country/track and field. 

Once a week, I trudged over to the field house to Coach Rich Lawrence’s office and attempted to decipher track times while taking in Coach’s critique of my most recent article (he wasn’t particularly happy about a story headlined “new track couch,” although in my defense I did not write that headline). 

I probably wrote a few dozen short stories replete with mile splits and long jump distances. Of the more than 1,000 stories I’ve written in my career, they do not rank among the best. But I was probably the last reporter to cover Lion track and field with any kind of regularity.

It wasn’t glamorous, but that’s how I got started in print journalism. I would soon become the East Texan’s campus life editor, then editor-in-chief before taking a reporting job at my hometown newspaper as a senior in college. I took 15 hours of classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and worked Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The thought of doing that today gives me a panic attack, but I was 21.

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The East Texan newsroom became a haven for me and plenty of other students. We spent untold hours in there napping on a couch, cranking out mediocre news stories and better movie reviews and competing in inning after inning of Shuanabrella Ball (a game we invented that featured a battered umbrella and nerf basketball and was responsible for a lot of damage to framed student awards that at one time adorned the newsroom walls. Sorry Fred).

That editor who gave me my first assignment? He became my best friend, James Bright, now the general manager of the Texarkana Gazette. We worked together in Texas and Oklahoma. He’s the first person I call when I need advice about journalism, about my career, about life. Of the 25 or so folks who worked on the newspaper staff with me, only James and I are still in the newspaper business (more on that later).

Other newspaper staffers remain close friends: Adam Troxtell and I wrote competing sports columns for the back page of The East Texan and, years later when I was running The Norman Transcript, Adam came to work for me. He was a key member of a newsroom that won three consecutive newspaper of the year awards from the Oklahoma Press Association. You’d be hard pressed to find a more thoughtful, compassionate journalist.

Cody Giles (of failed triumvirate fame) also became a close friend and moved to work with me at the Transcript. He’s still in Norman, having firmly established himself as a fixture in the arts community there despite working for the University of Oklahoma’s Bedlam rivals up in Stillwater.

Jared and Jasmin Watson met while on the newspaper staff, got married after college and now have four children (he’s a multiple-time Jeopardy winner, look him up on YouTube if you have some spare time).

Chancellor Mills was another one of my friends, an East Texan veteran. After he graduated, he took a job with Bryan/College Station Eagle (the first newspaper I ever appeared in, as a 3 year old at an Easter egg hunt with my twin brother, Joshua). We lost Chance in 2016 and I miss him terribly. He was funny and sarcastic in public and a very sweet man to his close friends. The tattoo on my forearm is in honor of Chance.

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I mentioned James and I are the only two out of about 25 folks we graduated with who are still in the journalism industry. It’s anecdotal, but an 8% success rate doesn’t bode well for the long-term health of our business. Talk with publishers and station managers across the country, and they’ll tell you one of their biggest challenges is hiring reporters and editors. Even more difficult is keeping folks in the business. The constant hammer blows of negative industry news are difficult to endure.

I’m proud of what we’re doing at The Melody and across the Georgia Trust for Local News. Building sustainable newsrooms is primarily about ensuring our communities receive the timely, relevant, engaging coverage they deserve. But it’s also about ensuring that journalists have quality, sustainable jobs. 

It’s the kind of mission that would have made 18-year-old me, the kid who knew what he wanted to do, proud.