Landing on 'Morning Joe' wasn't a fluke. I was a poli sci major in college. I interned at the CBS political unit, covered conventions.
When I was in college, I walked by the journalism school every day on my way to my own classes, and that's the closest I've come to having any sort of journalism background.
I come out of journalism, and then book writing. There, it's just you and your editor and maybe a copy desk, looking over your editor's shoulder, and that's the story. It's right there. I can show it to you because it's on paper.
I was brought up in a publishing home, a newspaper man's home, and was excited by that, I suppose. I saw that life at close range and, after the age of ten or twelve, never really considered any other.
My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter, as was my uncle. They were pretty good writers and so I thought maybe somewhere down the line I would do some writing.
Obviously, whenever the government is getting involved with speech, it gives me a lot of pause. I have a background as a journalist, so that's something that I take very seriously.
I would love to be associated with some sports organization. I was a journalism major. That's kind of intriguing, to do something in the political-commentary arena.
The only thing I'd ever done with news was to read copy sitting at the microphone in the studio.
The biggest influence on my books was the fact that I had worked in a newspaper for so long. In a daily paper, you learn to write very quickly; there is no time to sit and brood about what you are going to say.
My father was a journalist for 50 years in Leeds and Fleet Street. I thought about a career in business to show I could do something different, but the reaction among prospective employers was, shall we say, underwhelming.
My dad was a journalist. One great trip we took was to Israel. We went there and drove through the whole country, and it was pretty incredible. We went to the Philippines and saw the beauty of that country but also what poverty really looks like. That had a profound effect on me.
Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.
I was a journalism major in college, went to law school, and became a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. I loved it and was with the Department of Justice for years.
I wasn't always a novelist. I began my writing career as a journalist, working on an afternoon newspaper in Sydney, Australia, doing the crime beat and court reporting. Having grown up in a small country town, I felt as though I had nothing to write about.
I don't do research for my novels. Obviously, in my other line of work as a reporter and a columnist, I've had the opportunity to get to know both social workers and TV talk-show hosts.
See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.
When I bought 'The New York Observer,' my experience in journalism was limited to a single article I had written for a college magazine.
My own special relationship with America began at an early age. My father, a fellow journalist, named me after Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
I never worked on the school newspaper.
I had a lot of jobs before I got into music. When I was 15, I was a copy boy for the 'Evening Chronicle' in Newcastle. Then I was a journalist. I value those experiences - I got to see how the world works.
I read rip-and-read news, but I wasn't a reporter. I was reading the wire, and the other thing was, I was reading commercials - and I could do a hell of a commercial.
I wasn't the kind of kid like Spielberg or Lucas who knew to go to film school. I didn't know at 12 what I was going to do; it took me until I was about 23. I studied journalism in college, but after school, I got a job in public television and I never worked as a journalist for one moment.
I'm always writing new books so I don't dwell on the ones I've already done. I think that's a habit from being a newspaper guy because you're always writing columns and you can't reflect on the ones you've already done.
Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan.
I was in the business of marketing, and I have two Bachelor's Degrees in Political Journalism, and I wrote for the school newspaper at the time.
