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Journalist and Foreign Correspondent

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timcollieExplore Being a Journalist and Foreign Correspondent with Tim Collie

cz: Briefly describe your job.

I’m a reporter with the Sun-Sentinel, specializing primarily in foreign-based projects and daily news reporting, usually in Latin America or the Middle East.

cz: How long have you been working in this field?

Since 1980 as a freelance reporter, and 1986 as a full-time staff writer at daily newspapers.

cz: When and how did you decide to choose this career?

In high school. In 1976. Growing up, I wanted a job that would allow me to travel around the world. I also loved to write, but I had little understanding of what kind of career would allow me to do that. In high school, I took a journalism class and got hooked.

At the same time I had started reading Rolling Stone magazine and just became hooked on that style of (then) radical journalism—the highly personal voice, the novelistic style, the taboo subject matter. I started writing personal features on subjects like skydiving, drug use, even an expose on smoking on the golf team. Even though this was a tiny high school paper in Sandusky, Ohio, the teacher let us push the envelope. The last—the golf expose—didn’t get published but I was hooked because it got everyone’s attention at the school, and raised some neat issues over censorship. I went to college pretty much knowing I wanted to write full time.

cz: What education and training did you receive before entering your field?

I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and American History from the University of Toledo.

It’s important to take some writing courses, but journalism courses are mainly useful for teaching you a method, a formula, and some style. The rest is just the raw material you choose to write about. I was very interested in politics, philosophy, and the arts. I wrote some rock music criticism for local alternative magazines in Cleveland, covering mainly regional bands like the Iron City House Rockers, Michael Stanley Band, etc.

I also became very interested in foreign politics, I think, because there were very few foreigners around me at the time. I also got a bit hooked on the romantic, somewhat dangerous myth of the war correspondent. Central America was heating up as a political issue at this time, and I had studied French and Spanish literature in college, so I was drawn to these issues. In that sense, the best training I had was living in Europe for a year in the early 1980s.

cz: How did you begin OR what was your first job in the field?

As an undergraduate, I wrote freelance copy for The Toledo Blade and The Detroit News. I later interned a year for The Detroit News as a political correspondent in the state bureau in Lansing.

cz: Describe a typical day on the job?

There are no typical days, and that’s what I love about it. If I’m working on a project—something that may take months to research and report—I may be buried in research and interviewing for weeks at a time. However, if something happens—a major breaking event—I may have to drop all of that and hop on a plane for Haiti or Cuba.

cz: What do you like most about what you do?

That everything changes—the subject matter, the issues, even the speed and the methodology. I’m primarily a writer, but I may be called upon to edit or to do radio work.

cz: What has been the most rewarding experience so far in your career?

It’s hard to say. I enjoyed working on a year-long project about the environmental and political collapse of Haiti, which then did us the big favor of politically and environmentally collapsing just months after the project was published. That was heart-wrenching to watch—several people died in front of me, and a colleague was later wounded—but it was very satisfying bringing that story to the public’s attention.

cz: What do you like least about your job?

The feeling that you can never tell everything you know, or that people don’t care when you do.

cz: What is the biggest challenge for you in this job?

Time and physical constraints. I’d love to travel all the time, but it’s just not possible.

cz: What would you like to say to someone considering this career?

You have to have a passion for disorder, and be comfortable with chaos. Anal expulsive, not anal-retentive. This business can be very messy.

People have to be able to organize well and plan quickly, and then watch it all come apart rapidly. It’s for people who love to adapt, and constantly learn. You have to feel you want to know everything.

cz: What are the most important personal and professional skills necessary to succeed in your field?

Languages are a big plus, and a serious gap for me. I should have two or three more under my belt. If a person wants to specialize—legal reporting, medical writing—technical course in the subject matter are always good. That said, there’s no way you can speak or know everything. You have to be comfortable learning vastly different subjects. Obviously you have to love to write and report, though you may not do both well. Some great reporters are horrid writers, while great writers may be poor reporters. They are two vastly different skills.

cz: What would a person interested in entering this field have to do to get a good job in it?

The best advice is to write and not be afraid of rejection. Young reporters have to build clips, and the only way to do that is to find outlets that will publish them. You need to develop story ideas, and then try to sell them to a newspaper. You also need a thick skin, because people will treat you like a jerk at first.

The academic route is a good one, but it saves a lot of time if you go to schools with endowed, well-respected journalism programs, like Columbia or Northwestern. And then while you’re there, contact the local newspapers.

cz: What could someone who is interested in this field do to learn more about it right now?

Read, read, read. So many people who love to write don’t read. And it shows. Reading helps you develop a style, a personal grammar, an outlook. As Ezra Pound said, “Good poets borrow, great poets steal.” That doesn’t mean to plagiarize, but to mimic. Find the writers you admire on the subjects you love, and then break down their approach, their style, and parrot it. You’ll eventually find your own. The writer Elmore Leonard once told me he types up several pages of Hemingway every morning before he starts writing. He wants to assimilate the style before he tells the story.

cz: Is there any general advice you would like to offer to students on making a career choice or on work life itself?

Find your passion, what really excites you, and follow it to a career. It sounds romantic, but my experience is the money always takes care of itself if you’re the one with the most passion in the room. If you do it for money, you’re going to end up safe and secure, but bored. Take chances.

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