Was it visualization? My Start in Journalism

Was it luck? Karma? The power of visualization? I will never know, but here’s the weird story of my start in journalism.

In the spring of 1973 I wrote to 50 newspapers and wire services seeking a summer job. I received 50 rejections. I thought it was funny, so I taped all my rejection letters to the wall in The Tech newsroom. I now know this is negativity, not the kind of positive visualization I should’ve been using.

And yet I ended up with a job that summer. What are the odds?

It is true there is no situation so bad that It can’t be made worse by whining, but in this case whining paid off in a 1 million to one shot.

I told MIT’s Director of public relations, Bob Byers, whom I knew well, that the most bitter loss was the rejection by my hometown newspaper the Oregon Journal.

This conversation ensued.

“Who is the editor of the Journal?”

“ Donald J Sterling Junior.“

“Don and I had adjoining desks at the Denver Post. I will get in touch with him.“

Then I called Dr. Patricia Swensen, the supervisor of my high school radio station KBPS. Same thing. Told her I was disappointed at not getting on at the Journal.

“ Don Sterling is on my citizens advisory board. I will call him.”

I mean really, what are the odds. How many other civic organizations could Sterling have chosen to serve? What if Byers and Sterling had been on opposite ends of the newsroom?

Alas, I never thought to ask Don Sterling which call changed his mind. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps it was neither.

All I know is that a week later I got a second letter from the Oregon Journal that asked if I could start on May 30. Could I? Could I?

What would’ve happened had I told Byers and Swenson about my rejections from the  New York Times or the Washington Post?

Well, maybe it still would’ve worked out; I’ll never know.

Comments

[Robert E. Malchman]

Hand of God or random luck? We will not know in this lifetime. I've been thinking about that ever since I read The Crying of Lot 49 in high school, in which that was a major theme. Was this just entropy, or was someone doing work on the system (that is, if you knock billiard balls on a table, one result, however odd it would be, is that they all rack themselves up). Or think of something less than an infinite number of monkeys typing less than an infinite amount of time still turning out the complete works of William Shakespeare.

I also like the "Sliding Doors" genre, where a tiny change shows massively different results (a Butterfly Effect), until, at least in that movie, the lines converge again, because "that's how it was supposed to be." Or was it?

And then there is the Many Worlds Theory; that is, there's a world where you didn't get the Oregon Journal job -- you got one at the NY Times or the Wash. Post.; or the NY Post or the Wash. Times! Or none of them, and journalism turned into a dry hole for you, until you saw the potential of the internet, bought up all the name-brand URLs, and became a website squatter billionaire. Who knows?