William Rhoden, sports columnist for the New York Times, made time during a two-day visit to campus to stop by the School of Journalism Saturday to talk about his career and experiences as a journalist. He focused on the passion that is needed to work as a journalist.

“I love writing,” he told an informal group of faculty and students in the Ernie Pyle Lounge. “As most of you realize, the first thing you have to have is passion. You really have to love this stuff. If you don’t, it would not be worth it. It’s not loving who you are working for and not loving your boss, but loving the idea of being a journalist.”

Rhoden was on campus Friday and Saturday for the Herman C. Hudson Symposium at the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, where he presented the keynote Horizons of Knowledge lecture. The School of Journalism is one of the sponsors of the symposium, along with Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the American Studies Program.

“I’ve been at the Times since 1981 but I was a jazz critic at the (Baltimore) Sun previous to that,” he said. “However, my career was somewhat meandering. I played football at Morgan State, at the time where really great athletes were going to black colleges in the South because there was still a lot of segregation. There were also a lot of great journalists, just a lot of great people, going to black colleges.”

As he shared his thoughts of his career, the tone of the discussion turned toward his success in what he called the predominantly “white-man” field of journalism. Rhoden’s first journalism job was at the suggestion of Francis Murphy, his English professor at Morgan State, who was a member of the Murphy family who owned the Afro-American Times newspaper.

“This is the time where blacks were still getting most of their information from black newspapers because to a lot of white newspapers, black people did not exist,” Rhoden said. “If you look at archives of the Afro-American, some of the stuff you see in terms of how black life was recorded is just incredible.”

Rhoden said Murphy suggested working at the Afro if he was not going to go to graduate school or be drafted to play professional football. Because of the passion he expressed towards writing, Rhoden decided to join the Afro-American staff.

Rhoden said even when bosses and jobs change, the foundation of the newspaper and the goals of the job do not change. He believes this is an exciting time for him because he considers himself more of a communications person than a journalist.

“Journalism is just one branch of it, but to me, what we do is communicate,” he said. “My goal is to learn as many platforms as possible. What different ways are we communicating? Writing is still the foundation, but how can we communicate in different ways?”

For example, Web press, blogging, broadcasting and MySpace are examples of different and new ways people are communicating today, he said.

“A great thing about the Web is that you can write or blog more than what would be allowed in print journalism,” he said. But, he joked, “that also means that the longer the article is, the shorter the reader's attention span will be.”

Rhoden also is a consultant for ESPN’s Sports Century Series and he occasionally appears as a guest on the network’s Sports Reporters. He is a 1996 winner of the Peabody Award for Broadcasting for his work as write of the HBO documentary, Journey of the African-American Athlete. His most recent books are Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete and Third and a Mile: The Trials and Triumph of the Black Quarterback.


To read Rhoden’s work, log onto his bio at the New York Times Web site.