By Kenneth D. MacHarg
I am an addict.
That’s right, an addict that is hooked on something that I go to great lengths to obtain, even when we are traveling anywhere in the world. I will connect with it almost the first thing when I get up in the morning and it is the last thing I check when I go to bed.
You see, I am a news junkie.
Yes, one of those who has an insatiable appetite for news—in any form: newspapers, news broadcasts on radio and TV, online news sites, especially the wire services (Associated Press, Reuters, AFP—the French press service, EFE—the Spanish press service, the BBC, Al Jazeera). You name it, I have it bookmarked it on my computer or have a link to it in my phone.
I check in early and then frequently catch up during the rest of the day. In the car if I’m not listening to a CD I have the radio tuned to a newscast. And, I read four, (count ‘em), four newspapers per day that are delivered to our home—plus a weekly news magazine.
I’m hooked. When we travel if I can’t find a decent newspaper to purchase I start to get fidgety and restless. Our recycling box is crammed full of newspapers every Monday when I struggle to carry it to the curb.
How did I get this way. Well, I attribute it to my parents and where I grew up.
You see, my father was born in England, so not only did we get the Detroit Free Press newspaper and listen to the news on the radio (and later on television), we also received the weekly international edition of the paper from his home town, Barrow-In-Furness. (We also received the Northeast Detroiter, a weekly publication covering just our area of the Motor City. The first article I ever published was a report about our eighth grade school trip to the Detroit city hall. It didn’t win a Pulitzer prize but it did get me on the long path of writing and broadcasting the news).
Not only that, listening to the noon or six p.m. 15-minute newscast on the radio commanded silence from us while my parents listened with great interest to what was happening in the world. And, as a way for my father to hear news from the BBC regularly, my parents purchased a Zenith Transoceanic shortwave radio which I eventually inherited.
Remember, this was in the era before all-news radio or TV network stations or even hourly newscasts. Listening to the news was “appointment” listening, you had to be there at six, seven or eight a.m., noon or six p.m. if you wanted to hear the lastest. (There were no “top of the hour” newscasts every hour in those days.).
The “breaking news” concept, which is vastly overdone on today’s network television programs, consisted of a sudden interruption to your radio or television program with an announcement, “We interrupt this regularly scheduled program to bring you this news bulletin.”
Later, when TV stations were able to utilize filmed (i.e. movie film, not tape nor live feeds) reports, we witnessed bulleting on live TV accompanied by the phrase “film at 11” to indicate that out-of-studio reports had been “filmed” and would be delivered to the station and developed before being shown on a later program.
When I went away to college in Maryville, Tennessee one of my first actions was to subscribe to the Knoxville News-Sentinel and have it delivered to my dorm room.
Still, today, here in Carrollton, Georgia, I receive the Times-Georgian from Carrollton plus the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the weekly Guardian from England.
Out of all of this, I felt drawn to journalistic/media work as well as to the ministry. (Eventually, I combined those two fields of service.)
In high school, I took a “radio speech” course, chose a journalism class as one of my electives and ended up working for the school newspaper as the “headline editor”—a specialized and important position in a day and age when you had to be very precise about the length of a head if it was going to fit in.
I was very fortunate in the 1980s to be a part of a ministerial association in Jeffersonville, Indiana (Louisville market) which initiated a weekly call-in radio program on WXVW featuring local pastors responding to calls from listeners seeking advice or information. From that experience I was eventually offered a part-time on-air position as a DJ and for a while I also hosted the weekly public affairs program, Byline 1450, a program similar to the daily Community Voice program here in Carrollton on WLBB.
From there, through some connections, I was offered the opportunity to do fill-in program hosting for a Sunday night talk show on WHAS, the 50,000 watt, clear channel station in Louisville.
(Those clear channel stations are the most powerful AM voices in North America—the majority of them can be heard in at least 40 states as well as in Canada and the Caribbean. Close to where we live, WSB in Atlanta is one of the heritage, 50,000 watt, clear channel stations.)
When we went to Ecuador to work at the Christian international shortwave radio station, HCJB, The Voice of the Andes, one of my responsibilities was delivering daily news bulletins on the shortwave and FM outlets. Plus I did a lot of freelance work from there for the Mutual Radio Network, ABC Radio Network, USA Radio Network and Monitor Radio (the broadcast outreach of the Christian Science Monitor).
My most active newspaper work was with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, just north of Miami. I got into that by submitting an individual article related to our work with Latin America Mission but involving folks from a church in Fort Lauderdale.
Surprisingly, I received a call from one of their editors inquiring if I would be interested in doing some free-lance reporting and writing for them. Was I interested? Of course!
That began a several year relationship with the SS in which I wrote not only features for their three-times a week neighborhoods editions, but also reported for the business section and occasionally wrote articles used in the first section of the daily paper.
In fact, my first story for them was a contribution to their lead article on the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York City. What a dramatic way to start!
Since then, most of my news writing has been for my blog, Ken’s Introspect (kensintrospect.wordpress.com), although I have also had articles published in the Carrollton Times-Georgian, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Wall Street Journal and other outlets.
So, if you call in the middle of the day and I don’t answer the phone, don’t worry. I’m probably busy reading a newspaper or writing another article for publication somewhere.
It’s an addiction I can’t give up!
Kenneth D. MacHarg is retired and lives in Carrollton.
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