(Sunday, Dec. 14, 1997)
MCHAM DIMES AND OTHER VITAL STUFF
By Paul Harral
Over the years, friends have noted my habit of looking at my watch when the telephone rings.
That's because in my business, telephone calls at certain times often mean trouble. After midnight, they always do.
And so it was in a telephone call in the middle of the night a number of years ago in Denver that the overnight man at the United Press International bureau told me that a hijacked airliner was on the way to Stapleton International Airport.
It would ultimately end up in Rome, but the hijacker would let the passengers off in Denver, and so that was the immediate focus of the story.
As often happened, I was the only UPI reporter at the scene. The competing wire service - The Associated Press - had three.
I studied journalism with a professor at Baylor University by the name of David McHam. One of his rules was that a good reporter always had enough money in his or her pocket to make a telephone call.
They cost a dime then, and he'd often come into class and ask to see our dimes. No dime, minus points for the day; and many of us got into the habit of carrying spare change tucked into our wallets.
When we were short of money, we'd tell each other we were so broke that we spent our McHam dime. You always spent that last.
Then in one class, McHam described a scene: You've been sent to the scene of a big automobile accident at a busy intersection, and it is only minutes to deadline. What do you do?
There were lots of answers - find the cop investigating the accident, interview the victims, etc.
No, McHam said. Remember that you are on deadline. You grab the first person you see and ask whether he or she saw the wreck. If they didn't, go to the next one and keep doing that until you find someone who can tell you what happened.
When I got to Stapleton that morning, I stopped at an airline counter on my way to the gate where the plane was parked and changed $10 into dimes.
Then when the passengers started coming off the airplane, the other reporters grabbed the first ones off and started interviewing them.
But I asked the first one I saw whether he had seen the hijacker.
No, he said, but that guy over there did.
I'm bragging a little because I did very well competitively that day.
But I didn't think of those things myself. I was taught the two crucial techniques that made a difference in my coverage of that story.
McHam later switched to Southern Methodist University, where he continued to produce well-trained students who knew what to do when the story is crucial and the time is tight.
In Texas newspapers particularly - but also at others newspapers scattered across the nation - it's likely that a McHam student had something to do with the news you read.
McHam's been there right over my shoulder - at least in spirit, but sometimes on the telephone - in many of the decisions I've made about news over more than three decades. McHam never quit teaching me, and I never quit learning at his direction.
But David McHam won't be teaching journalism at SMU next semester. He's taken early retirement, and although no one is talking because of a contractual agreement, it doesn't look like it was by choice.
In 1994, McHam was named the nation's best journalism teacher by the Society for Professional Journalists, and that same year he also was named Meadows distinguished professor at SMU.
The SMU student newspaper covered McHam's retirement extensively and, in an opinion piece, noted that the vision of Ray Carroll, the new director of the Center for Communication Arts, "includes a transition from the `good program' the university presently offers its communications students to an `excellent program' that would attract the top doctoral candidates from graduate programs across the country to teach at SMU."
"Despite noting that a balance between professional experience and intellectual rigor is of paramount importance to a high quality communications program," the commentary said, "Carroll readily admits that a great deal of field experience is not necessary for professors to be effective. Such intellectual rigor, he said, does not necessarily come with having a Ph.D. but can only be acquired by going through the academic processes."
Well, academia is academia, and I suppose that is important.
But I can't help wondering whether "the academic process" would have taught me about dimes and deadline reporting. I don't think so.
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Harral is vice president and editorial director for the Star-Telegram. His e-mail address is harralstar-telegram.com. You may telephone him at (817) 390-7836 or write him at P.O. Box 1870, Fort Worth, TX 76101.
(Copyright Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Posted by permission.)