The frugal travels of a Hopkins alum
I was just sort of surprised. They liked what I was doing. I asked them why and they said, "Because you do actual reporting. not just gushing about the beauty of some place or the fancy meals or the beautiful people." There is actual reporting. It's a lot of fun, but fun can occasionally breed laziness.
N-L: What convinced you that fiction was not for you?
MG: In the fiction world, writing publishing short stories is slow and not very lucrative. You know, maybe if you sell a story to story magazine to a quarterly maybe you'll get $300. It's more prestige but it's not gonna keep you going. It's really, really tough. Unless maybe you get a novel done, or get an agent right out of college.
There are a lot more opportunities in journalism. I worked my way up. Journalism is a job. Novel writing is great but not the kind of thing you can count on to pay bills. I'm just a sort of lazy person. I can't get up in the morning. I'm up late at night, up late at morning. When I'm not traveling, I work at home.
N-L: Where did you start in journalism?
MG: The first place I worked for was a magazine called Shoot. It was a trade paper covering the TV commercials industry. I was a copy editor there and you know, fixed and edited everything that went in the magazine for six or seven months. It was my first real job.
Early 1999, I left there and went to work for FoxNews.com. At the time it was a lot more interesting than the TV commercial industry. At that time in early 1999 no one had really heard of Fox News at all. It was like what, Fox what? ... Even the cable channel barely knew that they had a Web site. Completely different editorial structure. They were not in touch at all ... I started as a copy editor, sort of became a news editor. I was the lead news editor, keeping track of what's going on in the wires, sort of keeping everything up to date. I did a lot of writing for news stories too.
It was excellent training for journalism because of the Web thing going up so quickly. You have to write so quickly. You have to get it up instantly full story. Covering things like the Kosovo war and the 2000 elections. And it was also not quick as significant writing training as Seminars but it instilled a lot of discipline of writing, economy. Writing Seminars let me develop without word limits. It was a new type of story.
N-L: What convinced you that fiction was not for you?
MG: In the fiction world, writing publishing short stories is slow and not very lucrative. You know, maybe if you sell a story to story magazine to a quarterly maybe you'll get $300. It's more prestige but it's not gonna keep you going. It's really, really tough. Unless maybe you get a novel done, or get an agent right out of college.
There are a lot more opportunities in journalism. I worked my way up. Journalism is a job. Novel writing is great but not the kind of thing you can count on to pay bills. I'm just a sort of lazy person. I can't get up in the morning. I'm up late at night, up late at morning. When I'm not traveling, I work at home.
N-L: Where did you start in journalism?
MG: The first place I worked for was a magazine called Shoot. It was a trade paper covering the TV commercials industry. I was a copy editor there and you know, fixed and edited everything that went in the magazine for six or seven months. It was my first real job.
Early 1999, I left there and went to work for FoxNews.com. At the time it was a lot more interesting than the TV commercial industry. At that time in early 1999 no one had really heard of Fox News at all. It was like what, Fox what? ... Even the cable channel barely knew that they had a Web site. Completely different editorial structure. They were not in touch at all ... I started as a copy editor, sort of became a news editor. I was the lead news editor, keeping track of what's going on in the wires, sort of keeping everything up to date. I did a lot of writing for news stories too.
It was excellent training for journalism because of the Web thing going up so quickly. You have to write so quickly. You have to get it up instantly full story. Covering things like the Kosovo war and the 2000 elections. And it was also not quick as significant writing training as Seminars but it instilled a lot of discipline of writing, economy. Writing Seminars let me develop without word limits. It was a new type of story.
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