The Charlie Reid Test
When I was majoring in mass comm/journalism at the University of South Florida in Tampa, there were many adjunct professors from the local dailies in our classrooms. Reporters and editors from The Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times taught a class or two and kept their day jobs. I used to think it was awful that we didn’t have “real” professors, but it didn’t take me long after I’d graduated to realize we had been blessed with teachers who were actually practicing what they were preaching in the classroom.
One of those adjuncts was a features editor who remembered my work in class and called me a few years later to see if I wanted to work for him as a correspondent. That gig lasted eight years and combined fun with a second income. Two other adjuncts were working reporters who brought in wisdom from the newsroom and didn’t rely too much on textbook exercises.
One afternoon, our assignment was to spend half an hour finding a story on campus and the other half hour writing it to submit as the day’s work. I was fortunate enough to be on staff at the university’s daily paper and I ran up to our office a floor above to interview whomever I happened to find. The editor was at his desk and I wrote a profile of how he had found rock ‘n’ roll and decided to become a music critic. The piece turned out surprisingly well.
Those classroom adjuncts were more memorable than the tenured professors in our journalism program. Charles Reid, the Tribune’s investigative reporter, turned out to be a major influence on my writing. Everything I’ve created for publication–from newsletters to news releases to columns–has passed the Charlie Reid Test.
Charlie was a no-nonsense, hardboiled reporter who didn’t tolerate factual errors. “If you’re gonna be in the newsroom, you gotta get it right,” he used to tell us.
I learned that during an in-class assignment when we were given an obituary to complete. The facts were on a handout and we had to write about someone we didn’t know. The subject had attended the University of Florida and I included that in my piece. In a lapse of judgment, I didn’t proofread the copy as closely as I should have. Somehow, my familiarity with the University of South Florida made its way to the obit instead.
My assignment went up on the overhead projector with a big red circle on my error. I received a pretty good class drubbing from Charlie about accuracy, proofreading and sloppiness. Every assignment I turned in after that was proofed twice before it was handed in to Charlie. That’s part one of the Charlie Reid Test.
The second part was more difficult to manage. He was big on leads, those first sentences that hook a reader and convince him or her to keep reading. “If you do it right, you got ‘em,” was a Charlie-ism. All of us in Advanced Reporting under Charlie struggled to finesse our leads so he would read them to the rest of the class. There was nothing better than knowing he approved of our writing. Writing solid leads is a skill I still work on.
Another assignment during the semester when we learned how to be reporters with Charlie involved critical writing. We had to turn in a book review of an assigned text: veteran NBC reporter Edwin Newman’s Strictly Speaking. Our only instructions were to make the review readable. When our assignments came back graded, Charlie said that one review was exceptional and he read it to the class. It was mine and he had given me a 96. After he finished reading it, he took out a red pen and added two points to my score. I think it was my proudest moment as a student writer.
One of my most lasting memories of Charlie was the morning he didn’t show up for class. There’s a tradition on college campuses that, if a professor doesn’t show up in 15 minutes, it’s time for the students to call the class a wash. Someone ticked off the minutes and we scattered when the quarter hour passed.
The next time we had class, a bedraggled, tired Charlie walked in with an incredible story for us. Our previous class had been on May 9, 1980, the morning of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge tragedy that veteran residents of the Tampa Bay area still remember.
A freighter navigating in heavy rain had struck the southbound span of the bridge over Tampa Bay. Much of the span collapsed into the bay and 35 travelers died; many of them had been aboard a Greyhound bus. Two survived, including a driver who stopped his car about a foot from the missing span. Had he not slammed on his brakes, both he and his car would have tumbled 150 feet into the bay.
Charlie had had a good reason for not teaching class that morning. He was covering the tragedy on scene and in the newsroom. He told us how he had lived on sodas and peanut-butter crackers from vending machines for two days and how he hadn’t left his post to sleep. We learned how reporters covered disasters, how teamwork in the newsroom filled in gaps, how everyone had to pitch in to make sure that there were no errors in the copy. I don’t recall what the syllabus said we were supposed to be learning that day, but it turned out to be the best lesson in news coverage any of us had received.
The lead in The Tampa Tribune on the day after the Skyway had been Charlie’s. I can still remember it: “Some were lucky and some were damned.” You couldn’t “hook ‘em” better than that.
I heard from a reporter many years after I graduated that Charlie had died of cancer. I felt sorry that other journalism students weren’t going to learn the Charlie Reid Test when they wrote copy. Today, I was reminiscing about Charlie with a Tribune reporter who used to cover the same beat he did, but for a different edition.
“We would cover the same meetings and our stories would be different. People would tell him things that never ended up in mine,” she said. “I wrote about what had gone on during the meeting and he wrote all the things going on around it.”
Working reporters like Charlie Reid and the others who taught our classes as adjuncts gave us a priceless education in journalism. I think of him whenever I refine copy and I’m grateful that he shared his knowledge with my generation of reporters.
