What's in it for you?

"I want to tell stories for those who can't do it themselves."

"I want to expose corruption and society's evils."

"I want to spend my life doing something exciting and different every day."

"I want to be a famous journalist."

The people who become rich and famous doing what they do define the image of their profession. After all, how do you know you want to do it unless you've heard of it before and seen what it can do? The names and faces we see in print and broadcast have shown us what it means to be a journalist and have probably given us some sense of why we want to do it.

But since way back when, many people have been reporting news and stories and at the end of the road, have never become rich or famous for it.

Those are the journalists I admire so much: men and women who dutifully and excellently report the news day in and day out, never seeing their names in glitter, other than as a byline in the paper.

Moses Newson is probably even more "famous" than many other reporters would get to be since he covered civil rights during that era. The story is in the Washington Post called, "Story of their lives: For Reporters on the Civil Rights Beat, The Trick Was to Cover The News, Not Be It."

At first, my blog entry was going to question how "embedded" a reporter should get into the story, but then a different question came to mind:

Would you give your all to journalism even if you never got rich or famous for it?

There never were any big-time journalism awards for Moses Newson. He wrote his stories, kept a few.

Posted by AL