Walk into a newsroom of journalists and you will smell coffee brewing and see people rushing for their 14th bathroom break of the day. You will see a business "about people and why they do what they do, and what it all means".
That's how Jack Smith, a 72-year-old former newspaper reporter and editor, described it to 30 visiting students from Auburn and Opelika high schools on the Auburn University campus.
While growing up, Smith waited every day for the mail carrier to pull up in his 1939 Ford and drop the newspaper off. "I'd read and study every issue, sometimes for hours on end," he said. The stories and design of the paper began his love for journalism.
His first route when he went to college wasn't journalism though. He first wanted to become a civil engineer until someone told him the amount of maths and physics involved. He then changed to the business school, eventually making the move to journalism. Paul Burnett, standing on the same place as Smith did during his speech, inspired him while he was in college.
Smith walked up the steps to his first job at the Montgomery Advertiser earning $50 a week. His first task was to rewrite an article on Martin Luther King Jr.
"Those seemingly meaningless stories could be just as important as a story on the front page." He told the students that it is a job that needs hard work and they have to be eager to go and do all again the next day.
"I'm glad I didn't decide to build the Golden Gate Bridge or take Wall Street by storm," Smith said. That wouldn't have landed him a job that is so near his heart. For him, the sweat and pain in the life of a journalist was worth every moment.
