For Love, Not Money

Editors Note: Later this week, with graduations across the country at hand, The Povich Center website will offer advice from professionals around the country to graduates  wishing to enter the world of sports media.

One of the best students to have earned his diploma from the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism in my 10 years teaching in College Park is a young man named Scott Goldstein.

Goldstein, whose father is a doctor, grew up in the Baltimore suburb of Reisterstown, Md. He had the brainpower to follow in his father’s footsteps into medicine as his two brothers have done. Instead, Goldstein chose a career in journalism— becoming the personification of what my friend, columnist David Kindred, calls an “ink-stained wretch.”

Goldstein, 30, has been primarily covering cops for the Dallas Morning News since leaving College Park in 2005. It’s not an easy beat and several times he’s had opportunities to go elsewhere. But he stayed because he understands—as so many before him—that many of the best stories in a city occur late at night on his streets.

In a recent piece, published on the Poynter website and excerpted here, Scott explained:

“Long before the internet and social media ruled our industry, we were expected to sacrifice our personal lives and make ourselves available at all hours. And while it’s true that many journalism institutions once had enough cash to bankroll foreign bureaus and cross-country trips  for major breaking news, anyone who says they set out in any era to be a print journalist for the money is either lying or delusional.

“I know people my age who have published books, made a decent living as freelance writers or jumped from newspapers to television news and back again. I enjoyed my own limited success, turning a one-year internship (for the Dallas Morning News) into a full-time job that I maintain today.

“None of that really explains why I’m still working for a newspaper, so I’ll try to explain that without sounding too cliché. I’ve enjoyed telling meaningful stories at least as far back as my days on my high school newspaper. The people I’ve been blessed to write about in recent years have changed my life and, hopefully, the lives of some of those people and perhaps even a few readers.

“It’s hard to imagine another time when journalists – particularly the young and digitally savvy – had as much opportunity to reshape the nature of what we do through blogs, apps, videos, photos and tweets.”

I thought of Scott and a number of other recent Merrill College graduates last month at the sixth annual Shirley Povich Workshop and Jamboree that attracted about 150 high school and college students to Maryland’s Knight Hall. They could not have been more excited – as were the  two dozen professional journalists from the Washington-Baltimore region who gave up a Saturday to share with the attendees their skills, experience and love of the games.

Two of the youngest attendees were David Molot, a sixth-grader at the Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown, Md., and Wesley Brown, a high school student from Glenwood, Md.

Brown has been to all six Povich workshops; I think he can drive but his dad brought him – as he’s done in the past — and stayed through most of the sessions. Molot isn’t old enough to drive,  but his mother can and she drove  him  a long way.

“I want to write about sports, or broadcast sports,” Brown said. Molot told me the same thing, which is what I’ve been hearing from colleagues and students for more than 50 years.

So, as graduation day at Merrill College draws near and the media landscape, tools, gadgets and players change daily, the hopes, dreams and passions of young journalists remain. I hope that never changes.