Journalists write for an audience.
It’s an axiom that guides what we choose to write about, how we report, how we choose our language, when and where we publish. It’s an essential part of the profession. And so, reporters and editors, columnists and correspondents fail miserably if they don’t – or won’t – understand their audience.
If they fail to educate, inform or persuade that audience the first time, they have to try harder the next time. That’s the power of the press.
I was privileged to serve as editor of the Optimist from 1988-89. And during four years on the staff, I wrote more than 100 news stories, several dozen columns and a handful of questionably reasoned editorials. But the most important thing I ever wrote was published on Jan. 18, 1989.
And it was written for an audience of one.
I had dated Amy Reeves, a junior accounting major from Abilene, for more than a year before that January, and I had plotted for several months to use the opinion page for my personal proposal. Sure it was an exercise in vanity. It bordered on abuse of my responsibility. But as most former Optimist editors will tell you, the perks of the position are not near as plentiful as the headaches and annoyances. It was easy to rationalize.
So on deadline day, the editorial page editor and I waited until everyone else left and replaced a column on that page with my own proposal column. The headline read “Commitment more than just four words.”
It wasn’t inspired prose. It fell well short of inspiration. It strung together some trite quotes about marriage. And it included two glaring typos that scream out at me every time I read it. But it had the best kicker – the final sentence of a column – I have ever written: “So, Amy, will you marry me?”
The next day, immediately after Chapel, I grabbed a paper, and hustled Amy over to the Administration Building, to the classroom where we first met. She read the column in the desk where she sat the first time we met, and thankfully answered “yes” without an uncomfortable pause to think.
To me, that’s a testament to the power of the press, even when targeting an audience of one. In the intervening years and the 21 years since our wedding, I occasionally have been asked what I would have done if she had said no.
I suppose I would have had to write another column.
Dr. Kenneth Pybus served as editor of the Optimist in 1988-89. He is an associate professor of journalism and mass communication and has been ACU student media adviser since 2005.
