We started the day Chilling on Sunday without a dateline or timezone. No rundowns, chyron crawling up the bottom of the screen. No assignment desk buzzing with urgency. No satellite window in three minutes. No MCR in your ear counting you down. Just afternoon light, slanting in the way it only does on Sundays, reminding me that some feelings were never meant to be produced only felt.
I have stood and worked along side with women and men who have given their real lives, not just their working hours to the craft of telling the truth. A senior video producer who has pointed a lens at history and held it steady. An executive editor who has sat with words in the small hours and made them matter. An SVP who has fought, quietly and not so quietly, for the stories that needed fighting for. A network executive who has understood that what goes on air is never just content it is consequence. A station manager who has held an institution together with both hands when the winds came butt producers and correspondents do the heavy lifting.
The journalism heft standing on our global sidewalks could fill a library. The broadcasts produced. The careers shaped, not just their own, but the ones mentored into existence, the young students, producers and reporters and editors who didn't know yet what they were capable of until someone in this circle told them. The institutions strengthened from the inside, quietly, the way real strength always works. The communities informed. The stories that aired and the stories that almost didn't and the stories that we made sure did.
And then someone said something funny and vibes changed, and the decades folded into each other, and we were us once again.
That's the part they don't teach you in journalism school. That the career is long demanding the industry is difficult the news cycle is relentless and the changes come faster than anyone planned for and none of it, not one single chapter of it, is navigable alone. Media is a group effort that builds teamwork.
We need people who know you who will tell you the truth when its too heavy or not heavy enough. People who have sat across from you in greenrooms and edit bays and airport terminals and waiting rooms. People who have celebrated your wins like they were their own because in some deep and real way, they were. colleagues who have held your losses without trying to fix them, who have simply shown up, across cities and timezones and datelines, and said: I'm here.
Friendship like that doesn't happen by accident. It is built, the way anything worth having is built, slowly, with intention, through years of choosing each other. Through the phone calls returned. The messages sent at odd hours. The flights taken. The tables held. The laughter that picks up exactly where it left off, no matter how much time has passed, no matter how many things have changed.
No matter what city. And now Sunday afternoon settles in the way it always does generously, without agenda and Grooving comes through the speakers and something in the chest loosens.
Really couldn't get away too soon. There is a particular kind of peace that only arrives when you have lived enough life to know what matters. When the noise has quieted enough, just for an afternoon, just for this, and what remains is clear and simple and true.
What remains is the friendship. The laughter. reeling in the years.
The way these colleagues have been there for me, again and again, in every chapter, through every version of this life I have been lucky enough to live. The journalism was a public service and the first draft of history.
This Sunday had no deadlines for today, on this particular afternoon, .with the music playing and the light doing what Sunday light does. Just me and my wife deeply, quietly, completely grateful.
We wrapped up this day attending a Juneteenth celebration at Grace Church where we heard a preacher read the story while Hammond organ keyboard played and sang like the master Ray Charles. Here is PBS’s reports from the sacred to the secular. https://archive.org/details/Music_Masters_Ray_Charles_Elvis_Presley
