Believe it or not, I think it's terrific. People grumble about poor columnists all the time, but nobody ever does anything about it.
A weak columnist who is questionable and a joke in the community brings a whole newspaper down. Sometimes, editors don't have the guts to pull the trigger. So when circumstances take the weak links out of the chain, it's great for everybody -- newspapers, readers, reporters (who roll their eyes while these poor columns get printed next to their stuff).
Great question. I lead the boycott against Dallas. It makes for good columns.
Because I grew up in New York City and was educated and worked in Philadelphia (Penn and the Philadelphia Inquirer), I know what a great metropolitan area is -- and Dallas is not. It is a pretentious town with social-climbing wannabes. Women wear the most ridiculous clothes (I'm working on my first country song called "It's Hard to be a Brunette in Texas").
I could go on (Dallas produced Ross Perot, the Dallas Cowboys and JFK's assassination) but I'll now switch gears and tell you what's great about Fort Worth. It's a fabulous town, probably the best I've ever lived in. It has all the great attributes of a major city but is small enough so you don't lose yourself in it.
It's got a real cowboy/Western flavor that lives and is cherished. It's not pretentious. It's got the greatest urban downtown in America (thanks to the Bass billionaires who pumped almost $200 million into refurbishing it). It's got great museums, a new concert hall that is one of the best in the world and a very creative and witty populace. I love it here.
And I've been to Dallas once in the past year (even though it's only a half hour away!)
I decided I wanted to be a journalist so I could emulate my hero, New York columnist Pete Hamill.
So in about the seventh grade, I wrote a profile of a football player named Billy Knapp who was a classmate of mine. Billy lived and breathed football, but he hurt his leg and couldn't play. Instead, he showed up at every single practice and game and stood on the sidelines.
I had a vision that I could describe what was in his head and show his dedication and loyalty to his teammates -- and I did in that first important story.
I'd want other columnists to do what I do on the Internet to really stretch their capabilities as writers and community people.
If you go to my new all-purpose Dave Page, I've found a way to channel all my sites from one place. From http://www.star-telegram.com/dave -- you can see my latest video column, my past video columns, read my latest column, read past columns in the archives, visit my psycho dog's popular newsgroup, visit my infant son's popular newsgroup, visit my not-so-popular newsgroup, visit my favorite charity's Web site (where I volunteer my time), visit the National Society of Newspaper Columnist's site, which I help produce, visit my alter ego's web site (J.R. Lieber, the Yankee Cowboy everybody loves to hate) and read his latest weekly online ravings.
These different facets show that being a columnist in the 21st century will probably be a lot more than just writing three columns a week.
When I was a reporter for 15 years, I was a point-of-view reporter -- meaning I often wrote news stories that dripped with my point of view and were almost columns.
It's reporting like that which gives newspapers trouble. It was almost impossible to say I wasn't biased. In fact, politicians whom I skewered would constantly complain that I was not objective about them.
But I knew just how far I could go. I didn't cross the line. Now that's really not so good, is it? But I couldn't yet be a columnist, so I did the next best thing. But was it the next best thing? Obviously not. So to a reporter who wants to be like me, I say, "Just go ahead and do what I did? Work real hard to get a columnist's job somewhere else!"
At age 14, I was co-host of a nationally-televised show on NBC called Take A Giant Step. This was on Saturday mornings and was for kids. It was unscripted and live. Just average kids talking about stuff. It was dreadful, really, but it was an experiment -- an antidote to cartoons in the 1971-72 TV season.
It was a great experience for me. I talked about stuff I cared about, which is what I do today. And the studio we used was the one right across the hall from where Saturday Night Live has always been taped.
Copyright 1998, Thomas L. Mangan
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