I've been writing for a long time. From first grade and ramblings about how Ninja Turtles are cool to sixth grade and book reports on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Then essay after essay after essay in high school English trying to dredge some meaning from the bone-crushingly depressing The Grapes of Wrath.
I finally started writing for a newspaper in January of this year. I got my first chance to write columns, football game summaries, sports analysis, and local news stories for BYU-I's Scroll student paper.
But all this time I never received a dime for my hard work.
This futility ended last night. There's a student in my Editing class named Zach; he managed to wrangle a full-time job with The Post Register in Idaho Falls after applying for an internship last year. A few weeks ago Zach informed me that the newspaper was looking for stringers to cover high school sporting events. After calling one of the Post Register staffers and working through schedule conflicts, I finally started working for the paper last night.
I headed down to Idaho Falls around 8:00 p.m., and after about 24 U-turns, found the office. I took phone calls from high school basketball coaches sending in box scores and quotes about their games that night. Since my day job is on the phones, I felt pretty confident.
The highlight of the night was definitely my adventures trying to find coach Leroy Johnson. Leroy called in a score and I forgot to get some vital information from him, so I grabbed the phone list of all the high schools coaches in the area and gave his number a ring.
Turns out it was the number for Leroy Johnson, all right, just not the Leroy Johnson who coaches girl's basketball. That was a fun conversation.
Anyway, the point here is that I'm finally a professional, albeit low-level, writer. I'm hoping to get an internship with the Post Register for this summer. They seem like a very good organization and the level of writing is pretty impressive. I think I can learn a lot there.
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