In Memory Lane news, ten years ago today I wrote my first newspaper story.
(Of course, if you count my high school newspaper, my “career” goes back a bit further. But the Eclectic [as it was and still is known] was really just a photocopied dork zine, not a real newspaper.)
It was a story for The Yale Herald, my college weekly, about the closing of Conran’s, a furniture store in downtown New Haven’s Chapel Square Mall. It was the first time I’d ever had to actually interview someone.
I wrote about 500 words, managing to squeeze in quotes from six differnet sources. My editor Abbe was shocked — I don’t think she’d ever seen so many sources crammed into a story. (I was nervous and wanted to get everything right. So I kept calling people. Thank heavens that habit went away over time!)
My two talented editors on that piece are now covering Washington state politics for the Associated Press (Rebecca) and clerking for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Abbe).
Here ends this self-indulgent post.