My Time as a Newspaper Reporter

 By Bruce Shawkey


I was a reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal for about five years while I was at the University of Wisconsin Journalism School. General assignment. Worked mostly nights and weekends. Here's a sample for my clip file:


Mail order peddlers (mail order consulting)

Timber frame housing

Mobile home owners want more rights

Cow chip throwing contest

Madison touch football league

UW botanist Stan Pelequin develops true potato seed to ease world hunger

Stewart Brand "Whole Earth Catalog"

Madison Muskies organ player

Badger spelling bee

Acid rain research project

Gasoline consumption drops in Wisconsin

Sun Prairie sweet corn festival

Civilian Conservation Corps reunion UW Arboretum

Mifflin Street block party

Chef to Wisconsin governors

Annual library book sale

Painters union reach accord

Drunk driving laws toughened (made front page above the fold)

Richard Roberts, son of Oral, holds rally at Oscar Mayer Theater

Building handicapped accessible homes

Henry Vilas children's zoo opens

State disaster testing 

Middleton high school graduation

Willy Street fair

I think I did a pretty good job as a reporter. I really only botched one story that required a correction, and that was a hearing on a proposed homeless shelter in the city of Madison, that I thought was being proposed in Monona and reported it as such.

I wasn't held in very high regard by the regular reporters at the Journal, with the exception of Marv Balousek, the police reporter, and George Hesselberg, another general assignment reporter. We remained friends long after I left the Journal.

My editors were a veritable buffet of dysfunction. I had Clifford Behnke, who downright frightened me. Then there was the irascible night editor, John Aehl. There was Bob Franzmann, and Steve Lovejoy, a chain smoking pessimist who utterly belied his namesake.

We filed our stories on computers, actually dumb terminals, which spat out copy of photographic paper which was then waxed and fit into page proofs, which then went to the press room and made into plates.

Many of my stories had a "features" feel to them, and I lobbied hard to join the features department under editor Don Davies. But to no avail. The job did set me up quite well as editor/reporter jobs for the Credit Union Executives Society (CUES) and CUNA. 

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