I attended Florida State University on an academic and leadership scholarship, changed my major from biology to broadcasting, and transferred to the University of South Carolina for my last two years.
During a long career in TV broadcasting, I spent a lot of time contributing to other people's creations.
You have to assume once you go online, anything you put there can be made public. Yet while you're online, you feel like it's a private, sacred space. But you're really broadcasting to the world.
The only reason I got into broadcasting was, I needed money to pay for my junior and senior years at college, and they hired me, those fools!
Originally, I think, I wanted to be an actor. But I got into broadcasting by accident, if you will, because I needed money to pay for my college education. I applied for a summer announcing job at a couple of radio stations.
The radio stations will happily recycle a badly worded statement by a politician all day but will steer clear of broadcasting more than once or twice a poem by Tomas Transtromer or Rita Dove.
All they expected me to do was rip and read the wire 'leads,' without doing any original reporting. It was pretty basic, but gave me a taste of how to combine my love of politics and broadcasting.
When I entered college, it was to study liberal arts. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied English literature, but I fell in love with broadcasting, with telling stories about other people's exploits.
I'm the kind of guy who has to be two feet in if I am going to give my best effort, so broadcasting is something I'm looking at long-term.
It is a fact of broadcasting that you've got to get the big audiences for the channel that you're on.
