The First Byline

I am obviously neither Woodward or Bernstein.  But that's OK.

I didn't know it had arrived.

As I got ready to leave the home office of the Wilton Bulletin yesterday, I noticed what looked like the latest issue of the paper.  Being new, I wasn't sure when the it came out.  Now I know that it hits on Thursday.

I'm not jaded.  Never have been.  I still smile when I hear a promo, commercial, or a tape of something I've done on the radio.  I smile at seeing the work I've done with Tom Prizeman on PCTV, or sheepishly grin when my mug showed up in a recent story on NBC Connecticut.

So it was that I felt proud at seeing page A3.  There it was: a story I wrote about new trees being planted in Wilton Center.  Sure, it got edited, and in the end, some of the words aren't mine, but that's a reality of the business.  Each criticism that my work has gotten has been met with a shrug of the shoulders and a hearty "OK."  Such is the nature of the beast.

There are other things in this issue that I wrote, or edited, but only the tree story has those magic words:

By Rob Adams
Reporter

I'll always have that to fall back on.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I've been published in the Greenwich Citizen, the Greenwich Post, the Times of Brunswick, and countless websites.  Pretty cool.  But there was something different about this.  Maybe it was because it wasn't sports.  I'm not sure.

Future stories will be about a piano school, a science fair, and dogs appearing in the Westminster dog show.  More, obviously, are on the way.

Among my concerns one week in is that I'm trying too hard to write the way management wants me to write.  I still have to find my own voice, which can't quite be the one I've used here, and really can't be the same that I've used writing sports (and Paul Silverfarb has graciously never edited me much, which I always took as a compliment).  So I have to strike the balance.  That seems to be the theme.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to looking out my window as I watch the snow fall from a beast named Nemo.

And writing my next story.

I'll add links and tell you more as we go along here.  This story isn't online yet.