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84 SEVEN IN thE RIght OR WRONg PlacE LIFE WAS GOING to be very different if your employer in 1978 happened to be the Washington Star rather than the Washington Post, United Press International rather than the associated Press. While it is possible to be in the right place at the right time, it is also possible to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. the Washington Star, which was founded on December 16, 1852, was an afternoon newspaper and for many years the city’s newspaper of record. It ceased publication on august 7, 1981. Roberta hornig-Draper could never forget the day: “Aside from my husband’s death, the day the Washington Star folded was the worst day of my life. I had no notice. My boss called at 6 a.m. to tell me so I wouldn’t hear it on the radio. So I walked into the kitchen and made myself a Manhattan. I thought, ‘How many times do you have a death in the family?’ It was intense. I had been there since 1957. I started out as a copy boy. It was a wonderful place to work, even though it was conservative, because they gave reporters absolute free rein. No one ever told you what to do.”1 What took place next, according to John Fialka, was “a fire sale of reporters.” Fialka, who had a law degree from georgetown and a master ’s in journalism from columbia, “wound up at the Wall Street Journal .” he, too, called the Star “a wonderful place to work,” but the lesson that he took from the paper’s demise was that “journalists have to be kind of agile and not get too comfortable.” During Fialka’s long career at the Journal, he was the paper’s lead reporter in the 1991 gulf War, after which he wrote a book about the battles between the press and the In the Right or Wrong Place 85 military. “I’m happy with my career path. I never wanted to be any more than a reporter or writer.”2 as for hornig-Draper: “A friend from NBC called with a job offer. I became their Senate producer, which is a euphemism for off-camera. I did all the Tuesday lunches, all the interviews, all the press conferences, wrote memos, and told the reporters what to report. I stayed at NBC for nearly 20 years.” the death of the Star should not have been a total surprise. Staffers themselves referred to the paper as “the Financially troubled Washington Star.” Barbara cochran, who joined the paper as a trainee on the copy desk and rose to managing editor, “finally decided it was time to move on” in 1979 and joined National Public Radio, where she was instrumental in creating Morning Edition. her career continued as executive producer of NBc’s Meet the Press and as Washington bureau chief of cBS; she then served 12 years as president of the Radio-television News Directors association.3 Investigative reporter Ed Pound also left the Star in 1979, after 2 years, to spend 3 years at the New York Times, 11 years at the Wall Street Journal, 4 years at U.S. News & World Report, and 4 years at USA Today; he then went back to U.S. News and later to National Journal for 2 years. In 2009 he went to work for the federal government’s Recovery accountability and transparency Board. In a sense, he said, he never changed jobs, only employers, moving “[whenever] I wasn’t getting the opportunity to do the investigative reporting that I wanted to do. It generally comes down to a feeling that you don’t think you can accomplish what you want to accomplish at the place you’re at.”4 Several reporters moved from the Star to on-camera jobs in tV. In a rare transition, lisa Myers, the Star’s young White house correspondent, was hired by NBc and ultimately became its chief investigative correspondent .5 Stephen aug went to aBc News, “where I covered business and the economy for them from 1981 until they had enough of me in 1995, and then I retired. Quite frankly, I was burned out. I was tired. After 30-some odd years of daily reporting with deadlines every day, I really just had it, and they decided not to renew my contract. I was not upset at all.”6 Specialists seem to have had a smoother path to...

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