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Who are your journalism heroes?

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Mizzougrad96, May 13, 2011.

  1. Yeah, we actually had that discussion on the desk at my paper a couple days ago. The consensus was Grantland Rice would not have made it as a journalist today. An editor would be asking him what the score was.

    As far as mine, I go with guys I know who have been a big help to me, so I'll say Jay Heater and Vahe Gregorian.
     
  2. SF_Express

    SF_Express Active Member

    When I was coming up, and I'm sure there was more to it than this, I always felt there were two ways to go -- Red Smith or Jim Murray.

    I tried to be Red Smith -- I didn't do Murray-esque humor well -- which makes it all the more horrifying that I sat at the same table, alone, with him in a hospitality room at the Jackie Smith Super Bowl and was too shy to say a word -- and he was only one of the nicest guys in the business, I've heard.

    You couldn't grow up in the Midwest, at least I couldn't, and not be a Royko guy. Royko was also one of T.J. Simers' heroes, and Simers had a profound effect on my career.

    Ebert is somebody whose wondrous construction of movie reviews -- particularly the bad ones -- I am only now appreciating as much as I should.

    Heinz.

    Oh, and here's one who doesn't come up here very often: Harry Crews. I used to read and reread Harry Crews columns in Esquire over and over again. And Roy Blount Jr. got the same attention from me when he was writing for Esquire.
     
  3. jlee

    jlee Well-Known Member

    Salih Saif Aldin, Tareq Ayyoub, Atwar Bahjat, Enzo Baldoni, James Brolan, Saeed Chmagh, José Couso, Mazen Dana, Paul Douglas, Alaa Abdulkareem Fartusi, Kaveh Golestan, Sahar Hussein al-Haideri, Safah Abdul Hameed, Khalid Hassan, Michael Kelly, Waleed Khaled, Terry Lloyd, Mazen al-Tumeizi, Waldemar Milewicz, Paul Moran, Frédéric Nérac, Namir Noor-Eldeen, Taras Protsyuk, Gaby Rado, Riad al-Saray, Shihab al-Tamimi, Steven Vincent, Pierre Billaud, Harry Burton, Rupert Hamer, Volker Handloik, Michelle Lang, Sultan Munadi, Abdul Samad Rohani, Johanne Sutton, Carsten Thomassen, Don Bolles, Lasantha Wickramatunga and many others.
     
  4. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    As a kid, for me it was reading Jim Murray. In SI, it was Reilly's early stuff and the investigative stuff by guys like Yaeger and Looney that I loved reading more than anything else.

    One of my mentors gave me an autographed copy of one of Jenkins' collections for my college graduation. I wasn't that familiar with his work at the time, but I read everything of his I could find during my first year or two after college.

    Away from sports, Ebert has always been up there. Reading about Woodward and Bernstein had a pretty profound impact as well.
     
  5. spurtswriter

    spurtswriter Member

    Woodword. Bernstein. Jenkins. Murray. Ebert. Kirkpatrick. Gary Smith.
     
  6. mrbio

    mrbio Member

    How is Jimmy Cannon's name not all over this thread?
     
  7. Frank_Ridgeway

    Frank_Ridgeway Well-Known Member

    Most of you would not know the name, and I can't ID him anyway because he went over to the dark side and decades later he is now our publisher and I would not want to appear to be brown-nosing.

    This guy was editor not of my first newspaper, but of the first to give me a full-time job. He had swagger -- a lot of editors did after watching Jason Robards in "All the President's Men," but this was real swagger. The paper did a lot of investigative reporting that sent some politicians to federal prison, this in a county in which politics permeated every facet of daily life, especially to the legions who owed their daily bread to patronage jobs. Yet this editor pursued all stories fearlessly and strutted around town as if he owned the place. We fully expected someone to take a shot at him.

    I've encountered lots of editors who fancy themselves as gutsy. It is not all that difficult to talk tough when you have a powerful newspaper behind you and your only interaction with the city is to drive through it en route to the paper's parking lot. But to do the tough work on an improverished, dying newspaper and face the community every day is quite another.

    At my next paper, we had a reporter named Ray Ring, who with the state's cooperation went undercover as a prisoner in a state prison and wound up taking quite a physical beating. He is an editor these days for the High Country News.

    Nowadays, my heroes are people I work with who seem to care about the paper as much as they always did. I say that not to be sappy -- I do try to force myself as I park my car to take a moment to reflect about what we actually do in there and the surprising number of colleagues who have not lost their zeal for it, even in these grim times. Their example helps me swallow the often frustrating constraints we find ourselves in today -- and the quality of shop talk we have on this board sometimes is part of that, too.
     
  8. blacktitleist

    blacktitleist Member

    Frank DeFord.

    Curry Kirkpatrick

    Reilly

    Lewis Grizzard. He was the first columnist that didn't write about Sports that I loved reading.

    Hunter S. Thompson
     
  9. Deeper_Background

    Deeper_Background Active Member

  10. shockey

    shockey Active Member

    you're kidding, right? i mean, if we took a poll asking SportsJournalists.com nation who jimmy cannon was we'd hear very few correct answers. and of those who know he was, how many do you think read his work?
     
  11. albert77

    albert77 Well-Known Member

    I was living in New Orleans in the early 80s, and I'd buy the Times-Picayune every morning before I went to work. I'd read columns by Bob Roesler and Peter Finney, and think, "man, I'd like to do what they do for a living." So I guess they inspired me to go back to college to get a journalism degree. Later, after my first semester back in school, my sister gave me a collection of Red Smith columns for Christmas, and that was both inspiring and humbling.
     
  12. SF_Express

    SF_Express Active Member

    The Jimmy Cannon thing is interesting. Legend in our business, certainly. Probably heroes to a lot of us who have been around for a while. Maybe it's more regional or whatever (not knowing him, but growing up reading him), I don't know, but I never had him on my "hero" list, just a big admirer of where he came from and what he did.

    The Harry Crews business, I have read few writers who both punched me in the gut or made me laugh or cringe as Crews did.
     
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