Ink Stained Hands and the Fourth Estate

Wednesday I sat in on Robert Wernsman's newswriting class at Texas Tech. The To-Do list still overflows, and I'm still going out-of-town twice in the next couple of weeks. I didn't have a spare hour. But I needed the experience.

It gave me what master's student Wes Wise called "some good ol' fashioned religion."

As I've written here before many times, I was a print journalism major at New Mexico State. Along the way, I made a lot of relatively small choices. And then somehow I ended up on Madison Avenue rather than 50 Rockefeller Plaza.

I'm not sure about the meaning of life. But I am pretty sure that it is closer to the latter than the former.

Somehow the newsrooms in which I've worked seem a million miles away.

Next week I'll be speaking to a class at NMSU. The week after that I'll be spending the afternoon with a former journalism mentor in San José, Calif. So I'm nostalgic, I guess.

Tonight I'll be listening to Peter Arnett give a lecture at Tech. So more journalism nostalgia for me.

This blog is, I suppose, one of my last ties to journalism. I treat it a bit like that, although I don't do either the background research that I should or the editing that I should. There's not time with the real life, and all.