As an undergraduate at the University of Maryland College Park, I was an English major and served as editor of the school's literary magazine, “Calvert.” After graduation, I worked for a few months in New York City at a trade magazine, “American Bicyclist and Motorcyclist,” and then returned to my native Baltimore, where I took a job as a financial copy editor at The Evening Sun, which was eventually subsumed into The Sun.

Over the next eight years or so, I did most of the things you can do in a newsroom: writing headlines and cutlines, covering a beat, working on projects, laying out pages, taking pictures, designing graphics, overseeing makeup and supervising staff.

After covering the waterfront, as the maritime reporter, for The Sun, I took a detour out of journalism and went to work at the Maryland Port Administration, first as a press spokesman and later in a broader management position. For a while I was publisher of a monthly magazine, called “The Port of Baltimore,” and ran the agency's international advertising program. It was during this time that I finished my master's degree in business administration at Loyola College in Maryland.

In 1990, I went back to reporting, covering real estate and development for The Washington Times. Like my first paper, The Evening Sun, the Times was a second newspaper in a competitive market. That's not always a fun position to be in, but it teaches you how to hustle and allows you to partake of the exquisite satisfaction of scooping a bigger paper and making it chase your stories. While I was there, I won awards from the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association and the Washington Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and was a fellow at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism.

My next stop was the Washington bureau of American Banker Newsletters, then a division of Thomson Corp. I started as news editor and worked my way up to bureau chief and executive editor.

In 1997, I came to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, as an adjunct instructor, after my wife, Roberta, received a tenure-track appointment in the English department. I spent a year working on my own publication, a newsletter called Trade: Finance & Technology, before selling it to Thomson.

For two years after that I was editor of Quality Progress, a monthly magazine published by the American Society for Quality in Milwaukee, and then took a position as an assistant professor in 2000.