I took my son to the library for Story Time again today. Afterward, I asked the librarian a question I've been wondering about since 2007.
Where can I find my old clips?
In a former life, I was a journalist. First, a copy editor. Then, an assistant features editor. And, finally, the features editor at the King County Journal (formerly the Eastside and South County Journals, formerly the Journal-American and Valley Daily News).
I mostly edited. But I also did some writing. And, when I left the job to go be a suit-wearing corporate editor in 2005, I continued to freelance write for my jeans-clad friends in the newsroom.
In 2006, Black Press Ltd. bought the KCJ and closed it in 2007. With it, the archives. My stories.
I didn't care to print them out or make them PDF documents when I could have. I don't know why. I guess I always thought they would be searchable online. But they aren't.
Not even the library has them. I was told maybe I could find them on film, but it'd be a nightmare unless I had specific dates. Which, I don't.
I don't know why I want them. Maybe because they are a part of my history. What makes my writing experience unique. Or maybe I just need confirmation that I've improved as a writer because some of them were written just out of college and I was not a journalism or an English major.
Today, I got the news I already knew. My stories are gone. But, still. I have to think they're out there somewhere.
I'm talking to you Tale of a Boeing Engineer Turned Pumpkin Farmer, Nordstrom Spring Fashion Preview, Yarrow Bay Gingerbread Recipe.
Where are you?
A lot of my writing is for online sites so my stories are online on some archives out there. Not that many of those I necessarily want to keep...
ReplyDeleteBut a lot of my newspaper stories just get tossed. My wife's grandma used to cut them all out and give them to me which was so nice. We put them in binders to keep, but she stopped doing that, just got to ill for that. So back to being tossed they go. Some are just crap that I wouldn't want to keep but some I have taken pride in when filing them. I know I'm bad about it and I know I should care more but it's just a grind and when they're done, they're done and I've already moved on to the next story.
But I probably will want to go back and look for my old stories someday too. It's probably one those things that you don't really know what you have nearby until you don't have it anymore.
My coolest stories are the ones that have exotic datelines (Seattle is an exotic dateline to me, but so is Mexico City and Tokyo) but those are the only ones that I really go out of my way to collect, and those are few and far between. Usually my dateline is Carson, Calif. - blah!