When did reporters become “journalists”? When I started out at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in 1972, nobody called himself a “journalist.” We were reporters, and proud of it. “Journalist” had a snooty air to it and seemed to be reserved for the newspaper trade’s bigdomes who wrote editorials. The rest of us wrote news stories.
I started out, as reporters did in those days, on general assignment, writing the weather story and tallying the numbers of dogs killed each year on Monroe County highways. Later I did time on the night rewrite desk, working from 6 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. — working hours I still pretty much keep. Nobody had a degree in “journalism.” You learned your trade by watching and imitating the old guys (there were very few women in newsrooms in those days), some still sharp and on their game, and others wrecked old hulks adrift in the Sargasso Sea of the office, the city desk.
But they could still teach, and my earliest stories fell under the ken of one John B. Kenney, a gruff oldtimer who showed me the ropes. He advised me to add my middle initial, “A.” to my byline, correctly observing there were a lot of Irish-American kids with my first (very common) and last (fourth commonest name in Ireland) names and thus help avoid confusion. It was good advice but I didn’t take it, and to this day Amazon has real trouble with disambiguating me from a dozen other Michael Walshes, some of whom are priests, authors of books on religion, or Hitler apologists, but none of whom is me.