By Emily Pennington

Photo Ann Choi

Our Campus: Tell me about your first job at the Portland Press Herald.

Doug Warren: Where I went to school — and this is going back a ways because I graduated in 1975 from Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. — I, like many students at that point, since I was an English major, had no idea what I was going to do. I thought I’d like to write, so somehow I got a job through a connection to my father. A guy my father knew, knew another guy who got me a job as a reporter for the Portland Press Herald. Actually it was more like I was self-employed because I was a freelancer and I covered a vast area of Western Maine, which is the state that I grew up in. From my apartment kitchen, I had my little Smith-Corona and I had little pieces of carbon paper, remember that? And so what I would do is go to meetings or to events or whatever was happening in that area at the time and I would type up my little story, put it in an envelope and take it down to the drugstore. The driver who brought the afternoon paper would drop off the Evening Express, pick up my envelope and drive back down to Portland, Maine. My stories would show up in the paper the next day. I did that for about a year and that was all I could take in a town with no bars, no women and not much else going on either. So I took the GRE and did very badly. At that point they took pity on me and realized I was either going to move or lose my mind. So the Portland paper brought me downtown where I continued to be a reporter and did some editing too. And that was my first real newspaper job. Mostly, I was working 6 p.m to 2. a.m. Somehow, I managed to be not only the editor, but also the rock music critic. But, working those hours most days put a crimp in the amount of music I could go see because I was always at work.

OC: Are there a lot of concert venues in Maine?

DW: Oh yeah! There was a lot going on then. I could tell you stories — like the time I went to the movie theater with Elvis Costello. I’ve also seen Liv Tyler naked.

OC: What?

DW: Well Liv’s mother, Bebe Buell, was a friend of mine. She lived in Portland at the time I was the music critic. She was a Playboy Playmate and used to be Todd Rundgren’s girlfriend. She was a glorified super groupie. I came across her when she wanted to launch her own singing career, so I wrote some stories about her and she started singing around town. We got to be good friends, so I’d go over to her house and there was this little baby who was supposed to be Liv Rundgren because supposedly she was Todd Rundgren’s daughter — that’s what I knew her as. I never saw him, but he would send her money. Well as you know, years later, it turns out that it was actually Steve Tyler’s daughter. So Bebe would be there bathing Liv and I’d be there talking. It was not much to see back then, but she was there.

OC: What about Elvis Costello, how did you meet him?

DW: Bebe continued to have these affairs with people and at one point she was dating Elvis Costello and he came to town to visit her. She and I were still pretty good friends so she wanted me to meet him. He did not want to meet me because I was a journalist, but she arranged for the three of us to see “Superman 2.”

OC: Where did you go from Portland?

DW: So it turned out to be a miserable job in Bridgton, Maine but turned into something that was a good gig for me in Portland. And then after five years there, I got a job at The Miami Herald, packed up, and moved down to Miami to be with a woman who dumped me after two months of being there. I’ll tell ya, the experience I had in Miami was the best. Miami is a great news town. The Miami Herald was a great newspaper and a lot of the people I worked with are top editors at papers all across the country.

I spent five years there and that was long enough to let The Boston Globe know that I exist, so in 1986 I got an offer to be a copy editor at the night desk, even though I’d been a city editor or assistant city editor at Miami. And I worked there for 21 years as an editor and writer.

OC: Would you say there’s any particular formula to follow to be a good journalist?

DW: It’s funny because I had no real journalism training before I started doing it. I had a passion to write, which is really what I wanted to do, so I followed that in the only way that I could really think of doing it. It was either that or sit in a cabin somewhere trying to write some great novel, which still doesn’t work out. So that was my passion, but I also had a passion for curiosity. There were a lot of things I was interested in that I wanted to find out about and write about.

OC: What are you reading?

DW: I’m reading a biography about Satchel Paige, the famous pitcher, right now. I’m mostly interested in people, which comes from the passion for curiosity that I’ve had and has sort of driven me — which is weird because in some ways I’m kind of shy and don’t really like being at parties. If there’s another person’s life I can find out about, or if I can get somebody to do a good interview so that you can find out about them, that’s satisfying to me.

OC: Who are your favorite types of people to interview?

DW: Well, that’s interesting. There’s a variety — clearly, the people who are willing to talk about themselves. I find the people I relate to the most are the ones where the interview becomes not so much a series of questions, but a conversation or a dialogue, so that you really feel like you’re on the same wave length and really communicating. And it’s hard because it’s an artificial situation — you’re having a conversation with a person you may have never met before or know nothing about — or you know about them, but you don’t know how they relate to things. For example, I did an interview with David Byrne, lead singer of the Talking Heads. He was great, I love him. This was probably 30 years ago. He’s odd, but he’s really nice — at least he was to me. I met him in New Hampshire, did a bit of an interview in a hotel room where he and the rest of the band were going to be playing that night. At 6 p.m. we were done and I said, “ What are you doing?’ And he said, “I don’t know.” So I said, “Well, why don’t you come with us?”  So we went to this great seafood restaurant in Portsmouth, N.H. He sat with us and we had a great time. We had a really enjoyable conversation. He’s very smart and on top of new trends. He’s still an artist that I admire and follow.

OC: Is there a particular environment that you like to write in?

DW: I used to write out everything in long hand. How’s that for being old school?  I did have that Smith-Corona to bang things out on, but now we live in Northwest Austin and we have a canyon behind the house. My desk is set up so its not facing out the window because I’d never get anything done — but it’s off to the left. I have a Mac and I just sit there and bang stuff out. It’s nice to be able to look outside and see something different. This is not my favorite environment, “He said gesturing to his closed-in, miniscule office.” I like the environment to be controlled and familiar. I’m not really good at sitting in the back of my car with a laptop and banging something out anymore. I don’t even like going to a coffee shop. I like to be in my place and have it not be too loud.

OC: How are you liking the transition from reporter to teacher?

DW: I found it really difficult to begin with. I hadn’t been in a classroom for over 30 years. When I started doing it, I hadn’t taken a class and no one told me how to prepare or what to do. I had some material that the professor I’ve been filling in for, Rusty Todd, left me and I’ve found that to be somewhat helpful.  But I also found out very quickly that obviously I was going to have to come up with something on my own. I’m still really thankful to the students who were in that first class I taught because if they had turned on me I would’ve just crawled out of the room, and then probably crawled out of the CMA building and then just kept going. I knew that I knew stuff they would need or that would be helpful for them to know, but how to get that across to them was kind of foreign to me at the beginning.  People seem to like it and get the information. I’m in my third semester now and I’ve kept a fair hunk of the stuff I came up with that first semester.

OC: Did Rusty Todd give you any advice before you started?

DW: The good advice he gave me was that I would have to make it my own. He left me stuff, but you can’t teach someone else’s thing.  It became clear very quickly.

OC: What are your thoughts on The Daily Texan?

DW: I’m trying to get them to think radically, do things differently and figure out why people are doing the things that they’ve been doing the same way all this time when really they need to be thinking about doing things very differently. Students can be fairly conservative, at least these days. I’m just challenging them to think differently. There are no rules, nothing’s written down, there’s no stone tablet, so it’s all sort of in people’s minds. I’m telling them that now is the time if they’re going to try something. I’m trying to change the look and the thinking behind what goes into the look. We really have to change the way we do stories. It’s not just enough to think of story ideas and put in a photo assignment.  They need to think about the type of stories they’re doing and how they can do them in a variety of different ways —video, sound, photography and interactivity between them and the reading audience by publishing quizzes and votes on stories.

OC: Did you have a mentor?

DW: The first one I had was a guy name Mickey Wiesenthal who was an old, heavy smoking, enormously fat, very funny, extremely knowledgeable guy in Portland. He set me straight on a lot of things in Portland. I could have stayed in Portland, it’s a destination place, my family is there and there are a few people still there now. I could’ve stayed, but Mickey told me, “Get out of town if you’re going to be a real journalist. You can’t just sit here at this level of journalism for the rest of your career.” He really thought highly enough of me to think that I could do something, so off I went.