Now my resume looks faked

The year was 1996.

I had hair encroaching on my shoulders, I was picking up guitar for the first time, and I was racing to make up for 18 years of not drinking beer.

I had a few newspaper writing clips, and they weren't terrible. I had been an entertainment writer for the student newspaper for my first semester, then became the entertainment editor. It wasn't exactly a sprawling resume, but I suppose it was better than some.

Then, armed only with some crappy feature articles and a highly negative review of the new Bond movie, I got a little cocky. Or lazy. I'm not sure which.

I applied for three internships: one at each of the major dailies in Alabama. This doesn't sound that daring, perhaps, but these were pretty hefty papers for someone with no real experience to speak of.

My hometown paper, The Huntsville Times, shot me down quick and dirty. The Birmingham News never responded. That left the Birmingham Post-Herald, which actually interviewed me, then said they'd call back within two weeks. Two months passed, and I prepared to spend the summer selling plasma and enjoying the revival of Jackie Chan movies.

But in the end, the Post-Herald did pick me up, and I was soon wearing a shirt and tie while suffering through abysmal heat, humidity and pollution.

It was a great job.

No, seriously.

At 18, I was covering plane crashes, multiple homicides, tax measures (woohoo!) and the new Mercedes plant. I was even assigned to track down a former FBI informant in the Ku Klux Klan, but that's another story.

That summer actually made a journalist out of me, for better or worse, and it was solely because the Post-Herald treated me like any other reporter. They didn't pad the intern's assignments with fluff. They didn't pull their punches when I screwed up. I spent each day trying to meet their expectations, and I was on the front page just about every other morning.

No one else will ever get to experience that sensation, though.

Last weekend, the Post-Herald published its last issue. Long a morning paper, the Post-Herald was forced by the competing paper to switch to afternoon while I was there. We lost tens of thousands of readers in a day. I realize this switch might sound strange to you folks outside journalism, but this is just part of the modern life of "joint operating agreements," corporate ownership and readership decline.

When I worked at the Post-Herald, the circulation was estimated at 65,000. When it closed, it was at 7,500. I'm just amazed they held on as long as they did.

So join me in raising a glass of Abita Turbo Dog (or whatever you were drinking in 1996) to the Birmingham Post-Herald, my first real employer and one of the best papers I've ever worked for.

Here are a few related links (in reverse chronological order):

• A former cops reporter I worked with there shares his memories of the Post-Herald's "guerilla journalism"
• A sports editor points out, among other things, that "the newspaper's death was inescapable from the day in 1996 when the Post-Herald and The Birmingham News switched morning-afternoon cycles."
• A photog's thoughts from my hometown paper.
• The corporate CEO explains what happens.
• The press release announcing the closure.