What was your first job as a journalist?
Compiling and writing the weekend Morning Newscast on a Small AM Radio station, the old WCLI 1450AM when I was in high school.
Have you ever used a typewriter?
A typewriter? Oh, how quaint! Yes, in high school in 1969 working at a local AM Radio station.
How is social media changing news?
It used to be that a columnist in a small-town weekly was only visible in that one print outlet in that one market. Social media enabled a small-town Journalist like me to grow a state, national and even global readership within a targeted topic matter.
Who's your favorite fictional journalist?
Gee, do you think I might have been deeply influenced by “Kolchak: The Night Stalker,” a reporter who chased and reported the strange, unusual and the unbelievable.
What does it mean to be a journalist?
We’re in the business to sell newspapers and web page views! For me being a journalist has been about writing what people very much need to hear about. The journalist job is about painstaking research, critical vetting of material and sources and bottom line telling a great story. In the final analysis it must be a story product that keeps them coming back for more!
How do you prefer to be pitched on stories?
I like a pitch sort of like a movie logline: “It’s Christmas eve, two soldiers in a war zone walking to midnight mass, have a life changing encounter with a UFO.”
What tools and software do you use to do your job?
MS-Word 365, Excel, a Browser. Facebook keeps me connected to research colleagues in seven countries and my contacts in Washington, DC.
What's your favorite social network?
Facebook
Who do you wish followed you?
Several young ones whom I mentored. Whose journalism aspirations laid along other paths!
Why did you become a journalist?
The Catholic Nuns in grade school made me write on the “Black Board five hundred times, “I won’t tell tall tales anymore.” So I joined a profession designed to tell stories! During high school, an editor at the old Corning Leader newspaper hired me as a Cub photographer and told me to tell stories with my pictures! The local AM radio station WCLI AM 1450 let me apprentice as a weekend announcer, were I got to write a little bit of news on weekends. Over the years, I began humbly writing press releases for regional community theater groups. My forty-year career was in military products where I wrote industrial movies. While Aerospace was my day job career. My vocation was always on the edge of the newspaper and broadcast business until I retired from the day job. I got my degree in entertainment writing and pitched a half dozen editors a weird weekly series. I became a columnist for the Syracuse, Newtimes Newspaper in 2013, and for seven years I wrote the most popular weekly column at the paper. Reporting unbelievable stories about UFOs! Now I am writing for the Roswell Daily Record, where I’ll be telling even more amazing stories!
Did you work for your high school newspaper? If so, what did you do there?
Yes, I was their photographer!
What story are you most proud of writing or working on?
I researched and wrote “The Scale of the UAP Phenomenon” to be published in the Roswell Daily Record Aug or Sept 2023
What advice can you offer to aspiring journalists?
Put the cell phone on Airplane mode and focus on your research.
When's the best time to pitch you?
Afternoons - 1pm - 4pm Eastern USA
What's the best pitch you ever got?
“Two old ladies just called and said there’s an Alien in their cellar!”
What's the worst pitch you ever got?
“You should write a column calling for New York State’s Congressional Delegation and Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand that they should advocate for congressional hearings about UFOs
What's your favorite drink?
Old Irish whiskey on the rocks!
When you're not at a computer, where are you most likely to be?
I’m a hausfrau free-lance journalist, I’m running the vacuum cleaner or loading the dishwasher or laundry between either researching, writing the draft or editing the copy!
Aside from your own, what's your favorite publication to read?
The Hill
What's the most common misperception about your beat?
That the topic matter of extraterrestrial vehicles and their non-human occupants; are regularly coming to our little Blue Planet is all ludicrous, silly nonsense and completely impossible in the world of reality!
