By Kevin S. Giles

It was the alluring smell of ink, the perfume of printing, that brought me to a lifetime of newspapering. I recall two distinct impressions.

The first came when we decided to print our Powell County High School, Montana, paper on a real press, discontinuing the practice of cranking it out small sheets on a mimeograph machine. This was a historic moment for the Powell Pioneer. When I took our stories and photographs down the street to the Silver State Post, the town’s weekly newspaper, I watched our words being compiled onto lines of metal type on a noisy clanking Linotype machine.

This is what was known as “hot type” back in the day. By my senior year I was editor of the Pioneer and, having experienced the thrill of seeing my byline in type, I knew I was destined for a career in journalism.

The second distinct impression came at the University of Montana School of Journalism. The heavy brass front doors, swung open, released a storm of inky breath coming from the printing press downstairs. I soon wrote stories for the university paper, the Montana Kaimin, in the upstairs newsroom.

When Reagan was shot

Ah, newsrooms. I’ve worked for dailies all my life. Two of them were afternoon papers, going to press at noon and hitting news racks two hours later and doorsteps by dinner time.

Working at an afternoon paper meant starting early, sometimes at 4 a.m. Three of those mornings I was designing the front page when major news broke – Reagan was shot, the Challenger shuttle blew up, and the stock market crashed on Black Friday. It was a race to the clock to build a new front page with the latest news and to “make deadline.” Deadlines were sacred.

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I’ve stood beside the big presses when the startup button begins feeding a web of blank newsprint into a river of printed and folded newspapers. Conveyer belts carried them to an army of handlers who sorted them by destination and route.

In the darkest and (in the winter) coldest hours of the morning, drivers threw bundles into their cars and pickups until the vehicles sagged at the axles.

They drove off into the night on their lonesome journeys to deliver the news before dawn.

Print papers still in vogue, with some readers

We once thought use of the internet would end the printed word, quieting the presses forever. It turns out that was a partially informed forecast. More newspaper readers get their news electronically, that’s true, and traditional newspaper circulations have dwindled. But many people still prefer home delivery of a printed paper. How readers get their news these days usually isn’t one way or another, but in a marriage of print and electronics.

A journalist’s life is sometimes thrilling, sometimes maddening, occasionally sorrowful. We try hard to avoid mistakes, but they happen, and on a bad day it behooves us to remember that we’ll do better tomorrow.

News reporting is urgent, complex and elusive. I learned in journalism school that I should be skeptical of everything said and done. Many sources are reliable and honest. Some aren’t.

We now live in a world of “spin” where growing numbers of organizations and government agencies hire people to “control the message,” as they say internally. It’s the journalist’s role to find truth. As we’ve witnessed in the current national political climate, truth is fleeting.

Six newspapers including Australia

In a 45-year career in daily journalism, I’ve worked for six newspapers including a morning metro in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. I’ve been a sports writer, feature writer, reporter, copy editor, front page editor, photo editor, editorial writer, managing editor, editor in chief and circulation director.

I’ve learned that reader reactions vary from accepting and approving to condemning and sometimes threatening. It’s popular on social media to criticize the “mainstream media” for real and perceived faults. A better nickname, I think, is “nonpartisan media.”

Some people brag that they don’t read the news because they don’t believe any of it. They say news organizations are biased because they don’t embrace certain political and religious points of view.

Be aware, though, that such megaphones of discontent aren’t widely shared. Intelligent readers know how to read and process news of the day and hold news organizations to higher standards in their reporting. Fake news? Yes, it’s out there, often intentionally disseminated on Facebook and other social media to sway people’s beliefs.

Real news is everywhere, covered fairly and accurately by trained and impartial journalists.

Look for real news, real journalism

News is all about people, often in crisis. In my reporting I’ve covered orphaned children, parents of slain children, families of people killed in terrible accidents. I’ve sat alone in a hospital room with a grieving father and mother who talked about how a tornado killed their young son. I’ve gone to houses in the dark to talk with strangers. I interviewed the father of three daughters killed two hours earlier in a head-on collision.

I’ve interviewed cops, murderers, prosecutors and judges. I’ve seen people dead at the scene. I’ve watched the torment in courtrooms as attorneys show autopsy photos on the big monitors for the benefit of juries. I’ve felt the pain and shock of sudden loss, for sometimes a reporter’s best tool is empathy.

I covered the suicide of a Marine who went to a VA hospital for help but was turned away, which became a national story. During the Iraq war years, I called parents when we learned their sons and daughters were killed in action.

I covered some of those funerals. In one instance the church was so crowded many of us couldn’t go inside. I approached fifteen angry young men in the parking lot to ask them to talk about their deceased friend. A few of them turned their backs and walked away. A few others told me to get lost. I said to them, “This is your chance to say something about who he was, to make him human and not another war statistic.” Two of them agreed to talk. One said, “I just can’t believe that’s him in there, laying in that box.”

Journalism requires courage

I always advised inexperienced reporters to do what I had learned myself: in pursuit of an awful story, when every fiber in your being cries out not to meddle in someone’s grief, do your job and never hesitate. If you do, you’ll never make that phone call, never ring that doorbell. Just do it, and care, because you’re putting yourself into the midst of someone’s most private moments.

Journalism requires courage. I saw “The Post” recently and was reminded of many instances in my own career when decisions were made to print a story knowing the consequences that would follow. Most journalists, including me, never deal with the magnitude of Daniel Ellsburg’s “Pentagon Papers,” but we’ve experienced similar scenarios scaled to our readership.

In one instance, a front-page photo showing a firefighter running with a dying child led to his mother storming into my office two weeks later, threatening to kill me and my children. As a young man, I wrote an editorial favoring gun control that the editor warned me would stir anger in pro-gun Montana. Sure enough, I was walking downtown during my lunch break when the local NRA leader nearly ran me down with his Suburban.

“You ought to be shot!” he yelled from his vehicle.

Just like in “The Post,” courageous decisions to publish must be made independent of predictions of doom. We have people all around us who wouldn’t publish anything critical, sometimes out of fear, mostly from misunderstanding the role of a free press.

Newspapers aren’t mouthpieces, nor are they public relations tool for special interests. Newspapers, as every other responsible news organization, have special responsibilities. Rolling out the tough stuff requires what we would expect of any story: accuracy, fairness and balance.

It’s not a newspaper’s job to appease everyone, but to probe. One of my newspaper mentors once told me: “It’s a greater sin to bore than to offend.”

Journalism is so much more than tragedy

Tragedy is only a corner of the broad canvas of news coverage. We have reporters who cover beats such as politics, education and sports. Other reporters work in general assignment, meaning they’re drafted to write about any possible topic that emerges unexpectedly.

I covered school boards, city and county governments, legislative committees, governors, senators and members of Congress.

I also wrote about people who don’t hold public office: authors, homemakers, students, foster parents, movie stars, historians, engineers, environmentalists, developers, volunteers, ministers, athletes, teachers, community gadflies, political protesters, adventurers, criminals, and the homeless.

I wrote hundreds of editorials and thousands of headlines, designed thousands of news pages, and taken hundreds of photographs for publication. I’ve knelt on a bed beside a woman in labor, photographing a home birth. I went to Japan on a friendship tour, writing about trying to communicate with a man as we shared a bottle of Sake at a banquet.

I found a man rescued off an ice floe careening down a major river and persuaded him to tell me what happened.

Over all these years, my byline appeared on many thousands of stories. My experiences aren’t unique. All journalists share them. I tried to learn from mistakes and did my best to help make the world a better place. Now, it’s over.

First in Montana, then in Minneapolis

Yes, it was a good newspaper career for the most part, beginning in Montana and ending in Minneapolis. The good days outnumbered the bad. The joy was greater than the sorrow. I was one of a few classmates from that ink-stained journalism school who stuck it out to the end.

I never surrendered to the temptation of leaving journalism for better-paying jobs in communications or public relations, as did many of my colleagues.

To me, journalism is a duty. To me, every word printed embraces our First Amendment in a free country, shines sunlight on our government, brings people to justice and holds up a mirror to the human condition. To me, journalism is the ultimate public service.

Even today, I smell the ink, but all these decades later it’s more than a boy’s wonder.

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Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.