Last Wednesday, the editor, sports editor and ad manager of your favorite weekly newspaper spoke to Platteville High School students during their Career Fair.

(What follows are my views. Jason and Ann can speak, or write, for themselves.)

The difficulty of the day was only being able to talk to students for half of the 20 minutes per session, because as anyone who has invited me to speak to them knows, I can talk about my job far longer than that. There was almost no time in the category of “Interesting facts about your profession,” such as the time I dictated a breaking news story for our Facebook page to the sports editor over the phone while a women’s group to whom I was speaking watched, probably thinking “This is why there are no good movies about journalism.”

The second question we were asked to speak about was “What attracted you to this profession?” According to my parents, I was reading the Wisconsin State Journal when I was 2 years old. (Ironic considering their refusal to hire me decades later.) I did “TV news” by cutting a screen shape out of a box and covering the hole with plastic wrap, or simply by delivering the news, weather and sports to my grandparents from a tray table in a corner of their living room. 

I always aced current events because I was one of the few kids who actually read the newspaper and watched TV news, both the network news at 5:30 and the local news at 6. At one point I wanted to be a TV weather guy, and in grade school I knew more about weather than probably anyone else in my class, and just enough to become freaked out whenever threatening weather occurred. (Side note: Only intelligent people have anxiety, because they’re smart enough to know the bad things that could happen.)

In the pre-internet days there was no feasible way to broadcast yourself, so maybe that’s why I gravitated to the printed word, since there were school newspapers at my middle school and my high school. (That and the ability to spell that earned my five school spelling bee wins and two city spelling bee titles. That is not a marketable skill despite some people’s social media writing.) Even though I’ve been doing this for going on 40 years there is still a thrill of seeing something I wrote accompanied by “by Steve Prestegard,” though you’d think that would have worn off well before now.

I got hired as a part-time sportswriter (with other duties) at a Madison weekly newspaper, and three years of work there got me hired at the Grant County Herald Independent in Lancaster. The first job also showed me a career goal after I got a check for writing a Dane County Board story for other Dane County weeklies — get paid twice for the same work. (Which may have led to my radio side thing.) I made a simultaneous discovery that signing up for the right class would get me the opportunity to write stories that both were graded (by a New York Times correspondent) and paid for through said job.

I pointed out Wednesday that mine is not the job for a person who doesn’t want to work nights (trying to find tornado damage in the middle of the night with very few lights anywhere since the power was out), weekends (people being arrested down the street from our house, pulling me away from a Fly-In Drive-In Breakfast) or holidays (such as the Memorial Day downtown meth-lab fire). Most government meetings covered in this newspaper take place at night, and you’ll notice that The Week on page 1B is full of events on Saturdays and Sundays. News doesn’t always fit your personal schedule, and it doesn’t always adhere to your deadlines either.

We were also asked to talk about “positive and negative aspects,” “working conditions” and “salary range.” I avoided a snarky response about the latter like suggesting if they wanted to get into my line of work they should find a spouse with better pay and benefits. I did point out that mine is one of the few lines of work where our mistakes are made in public view, thus necessitating corrections such as found on page 2A this week.

I have written here before that I do not love my job, and neither should you. (Then a woman came up and told me she loves her job; unfortunately I didn’t think to ask her where she worked.) I have never believed that tripe about if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life. There are always negatives, unpleasant aspects (in some workplaces, coworkers) and drudge work in every job. (I’m not one of those positive-attitude optimist types, which fits in well in this line of work.) 

The profession you (who are considering a career) should go into is the one you’re good at doing, because being good at your work should keep you employed. (That was my theory until the circumstances occurred that eventually led me here 11½ years ago, for what that’s worth.) If you want more advice, look up my graduation speech column I once wrote.