Nows and Forevers

Just wrote and submitted my first story in 2026. Just hit me this marks the 38th year as a professional journalist, thanks to getting a full-time job when I was still a sophomore in college in the late ’80s.

That’s thousands of stories and millions of words, in daily newspapers and weekly newspapers and monthly magazines and instant pixels, from Connecticut to northern Maine to New York and California and now in Pittsburgh. And lots of bylines in The Hollywood Reporter and Reuters.

I’ve been blessed to stay a journalist after all these years and after all the changes that have swept the field. The job is still interesting and fun as it was when I started. I had my year in the wilderness where I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, when I moved here. I’m glad that I found my way back. And I’m grateful our friend — the late, great Robin Glassman — told my Dad about an internship in Waterbury, Connecticut, that she thought I would be suited for.

Turns out, I was.

That internship morphed into a full-time job at the daily newspaper by the end of the summer that allowed me to pay for college without loans, forge a career and, looking back, a calling. I paid my dues. But a lot of credit goes to the women and men who often taught, sometimes corrected and always inspired me while I worked for and with them.

That began with Robin, who knew me from when I was a kid and saw something in me as a 20-year-old that I didn’t. I wanted to be a journalist growing up but at the time of the interview I was in a rebellious phase, not really thinking about journalism nor college but instead hanging out with friends, being a volunteer firefighter in my hometown, training the months to be an EMT, and seeing a career track of becoming a paid firefighter/paramedic like two of my friends.

By the time I left the interview, I was hooked on journalism.