Springboard to Journalism

Edited by James F. Paschal

Columbia University Press, 1985

This was a guidebook to help journalism teachers. I contributed a short piece called “Featurize Your News Leads.”

Many of the ideas contained in that article were things I’d picked up from my colleague Harry L. Allen at Western Kentucky University. He should have shared a byline on the piece. We shared a lot of ideas over the years and sometimes these ideas get passed on and the attribution gets lost. For more about Harry and his excellence as a teacher, read “Pass it On.”

This book was edited by another colleague, the late Jim Paschal of the University of Oklahoma. I learned a great deal from Jim and his scholastic journalism association at the University of Oklahoma. He also took me to my first Sooners football game — a loss to the University of Southern California, if memory serves. However, during my last year at OU, the Sooners won the national championship, beating Penn State. I, of course, was the good luck charm.