January 23, 2025

UGA professor’s challenge might be why you are reading this

 

            By the way he strutted, you could tell that the young professor was enjoying his command of our journalism class. Sharply dressed in a glen-plaid sport coat, a starched oxford-cloth shirt, a striped-silk tie, crisp khakis and spit-shined oxblood Weejuns, he pushed his tortoiseshell eyeglasses to the tip of his nose and gave us a menacing stare.

            “I need you to know,” he scowled, “that I have never given an A+, and I don’t expect to give one this quarter.”

            If I had been sitting in a quantum physics or calculus class, I would have murmured to myself, “Your record is safe with me, professor.”

            But the textbook that he was thumping—as if he was the Rev. Billy Graham—was The PRESS and AMERICA, An Interpretative History of Journalism.

            Wait a minute.

            (I just walked over and plucked the book, heavy-enough-to-be-a-doorstop, from a shelf.)

            This class wasn’t about using a slide rule or asking my brain to become Rhodes Scholar-smart. He was talking about one of my favorite subjects—history. All I had to do was listen, read and memorize.

            The challenge was on.

            His tests were multiple-choice.

            If you attended every class, you had a hint of what he thought was important. At night, I sat at the kitchen table of my New Moon mobile home, rereading the day’s material. I must have worn out a handful of blue-ink Bic pens underlining and scribbling in the margins.

            (I just paused, again, and thumbed through the book’s 801 pages. The musty smell took me back to 1969 and UGA’s Grady School of Journalism and Mass Communication.)

            In those days, printer’s ink hadn’t flirted with my veins. But I figured a journalism degree would be a good springboard into law school. Little did I know that the bespectacled professor was helping to redirect my future.

            He introduced me to John Peter Zenger, whose 1735 libel-trial victory continues to resonate today. While Zenger became a hero for free speech, it was his “Philadelphia lawyer,” Andrew Hamilton, who persuaded the court to free his client.

            On page 745, I reread what textbook author Edwin Emery wrote:

            “The obligations of any newspaper to its community are to strive for honest and comprehensive coverage of the news, and for courageous expression of editorial opinion in support of basic principles of human liberty and social progress.”

            That, readers of The Press-Sentinel, is why ink still courses through my veins.


            I am convinced—more than ever—that strong newspapers help to build strong communities. I hope that you don’t want to ever live in a community without a newspaper, either. What you are reading at this moment is not the national media. We are your hometown newspaper.

We are now in our 160th year of serving Wayne County’s readers and advertisers. We sit next to you at church. We visit with you in the grocery store. We cheer with you at ball games. We are neighbors. We hug your necks at funerals. And when you hurt, we hurt, too.

Growing up in Jesup, starting at age 8, I always had a job. But I wish that I had “enrolled”—as a teenager—in Elliott Brack’s School of Community Journalism at the Wayne County Press. I would have given up my courtroom ambition for the newsroom sooner. But I do give credit to the cocksure professor for sparking an interest that morphed into a passion for journalism.

Now, I’m in my 54th year of telling the “who, what, when, where, why and how.”

And after all these years, I still savor the satisfaction of earning the top grade from a professor who said that he’d never given an A+. Without him, you probably wouldn’t be reading this.

Challenges.

I love them.    

That’s why I am pleased the preppy professor taunted me to study harder and learn more about newspapers.

But most of all, I am especially grateful for you—our readers and our advertisers—of The Press-Sentinel.

Together, as neighbors, let’s keep the press (and digital platforms) rolling.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

dnesmith@cninewspapers.com