Anniversary of First Ever Newspaper Job

Five years ago this past Monday, on June 25, 2013, I conducted my first ever newspaper article interview for The Sampson Sun. I had no experience, and I was nervous; but I instinctively knew how I wanted to conduct the interview. I just let my curiosity take over and I had plenty of questions.

I interviewed the manager of the local movie theater about the recent change from film reels to digital film. My article was sooo long, but the editor/owner of the paper I was writing for printed it without a word. On my next assignment she casually mentioned to make the articles "not so long that the reader gets tired." Haha. I guess she got a little tired reading on and on about those new digital film projectors. Stephen King calls it having word diarrhea. I felt I had to include all of the information from the interview. Every little tidbit was interesting in my opinion, and I wanted to do right by the manager and by the topic of these new projectors. I think I spent 2-3 hours on the interview along, if I remember right. I went from over 1,000 words on my first article (it may have been closer to 2,000!) to an average of 600-800 words per article. I was paid $40 per article. I don't know if that is much, but it's more than I had ever gotten paid for my writing before.

East Park Cinema Theater
in Clinton, NC.
This is where we go
to see all our movies.

Below I have a few pictures from that interview, some of which I submitted along with the article. And somewhere I still have the newspaper itself that the article was printed in.

The new digital projectors

The manager was an avid ball cap collector. Lol.

He was also a fan of George Jones and had a signed photo of him in his office.

This is what was playing that day.

Thanks for joining me on this memory trip of my past writing experiences. If you'd like to hear more of these, you can leave a comment or tweet me @BookTalkwithRR.

Also, check out Smashwords.com for a great place to find ebooks by brand new authors. I'm currently reading the Sweet N Sour Kisses series by Cindy M. Hogan, which you can find here.

Thanks for stopping by. I'll see you next time.