Roving Reporter Wanted A Job With No Chains
The USA Today made its debut in 1982 to a wave of scorn from established U.S. newspapers. The upstart paper, with its flashy front page and shorter stories, was derisively called “McPaper,” said David Fink, policy director for the Connecticut Partnership for Strong Communities.
Fink should know — he was among the second wave of reporters to be hired by the USA Today back in 1982. He spent the next two years jetting around the country, writing about bigamy in Utah, covering Mardi Gras and examining the rebirth of longhorn cattle, among other stories.
“It was all new, it was brand-spanking new, and it was a very different place to work,” he said.
Fink is now an advocate for affordable housing in the state. But before that, he had a long career as a newspaper reporter.
He’d spent his youth doing mostly outdoors work, stuff like delivering prescriptions for a local pharmacy or working at his father’s car wash; enough to make him realize he wanted to do more “indoor work,” he said. In journalism, he found a job that gave him a desk but didn’t chain him to it — reporting requires you to get out and experience things beyond the newsroom.
Fink started out at the Schenectady Gazette, but eventually moved to the St. Louis Post Dispatch in Missouri, which introduced him to experiences that native New Yorkers like him don’t often get to have.
Car Washes To Corn Droughts
“When I was in St. Louis, I covered a corn drought, and the closest I’d ever been to corn growing up in New York was corn in a can,” Fink said. He rode in a tractor, covered deaths in the mental health system — “You see things that you never thought you’d see,” as a reporter in a new city, he said.
He moved on to the Boston Herald, then called the Boston Herald-American, and only left after he heard that the paper was going to be sold to controversial news baron Rupert Murdoch. Unable to stomach the idea of working for Murdoch, Fink jumped aboard the new USA Today newspaper. Fink said the newspaper was providing a strong national news source for many smaller cities and towns across the country.
This was an age long before 24-hour news services and widespread Internet access, and many Americans only had smaller daily or weekly local newspapers to give them their print news. The USA Today, pushing itself beyond major metropolitan areas, filled a niche.
But Fink was getting tired of the frequent job and city changes, and wanted to find a more stable position for himself — so he settled in Connecticut, and worked for the Hartford Courant until 2001. He left to pursue other jobs, going on to be press secretary for the Connecticut legislature’s speaker of the house.
It was there that he became interested in housing issues. Housing prices were skyrocketing in Connecticut, and Fink reasoned that housing problems were the root of plenty of other major problems such as education and health care. With housing so expensive, parents have to spend all their time working to make ends meet, Fink said, and often can’t afford to buy the right foods or spend time helping them with homework.
That’s what directed him toward his current work, which he says has plenty of parallels from his reporting days. In his role as a housing advocate, he has to figure out how to collect the needed information on a given topic, and communicate it effectively.
“Journalism’s a great career. It teaches you to write fast and think fast, and meet and approach new people in different situations,” he said.
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