At Shortridge High School in Indianapolis between 1938 and 1940, a young Kurt Vonnegut wrote for the student paper, The Shortridge Echo. Vonnegut continued to follow the path of journalism at Cornell University, where he served as managing editor of The Cornell Sun. Later, while studying anthropology at the University of Chicago, he worked as a beat reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. He would be influenced all his writing life by the simple rules of journalism: get the facts right, compose straightforward declarative sentences, and know the audience.
The So It Goes Year of the Journalist issue recognizes stories of journalists making the deadline, keeping us informed, and carving out a meaningful life’s work in a profession that has changed significantly in the last century, in large part due to technology.