1. On Background  6.5K 107 40  Early in my career, I was a green
reporter who wrote purple prose that read like yellow
journalism. But they printed the paper in black and white so no
one ever noticed.  Now, I was just a hack, one who needed a
story and needed it bad. The problem, as always, being that I'm
not the type to make my own breaks. I'm not inclined to write a
bogus memoir, or parade as a pillhead or claim to be the last,
lone believer in my generation. I'm also not opportunistic
enough to know a good thing when I've got it, so whatever it
was, it won't make it into print – or pixels – let alone a
bestseller list. Even if I did, the editors wouldn't believe it.
Such is the hazard of being in the truth business, not the fact
business.Forgive me. I buried the lede...  You see, back in
J-School, in the 90s, my future colleagues and I knew nothing of
the then-nascent Internet and the havoc it would wreak on our
prospective industry. Now, there's an entire generation that has
never read a printed newspape