"I bleed ink. For more than 30 years, I worked in the newsrooms of daily newspapers. I've worked as reporter and editor at the St. Petersburg (now Tampa Bay Times) and as an editor at the Charlotte Observer. For 15 years, I was the managing editor of the Salisbury Post, about an hour north of Charlotte and once respected as the best daily newspaper for its size in the state. I also served as managing editor and reporter for a group of six weekly newspapers in the Charlotte region.

I'm a generalist by training. Personally, I have covered police, courts (state and federal), schools, county commissions, city councils, business, politics and environmental issues. Reporters working for me have covered the legislatures in both Carolinas. I have enjoyed learning each of my beats.

As an editor, I also became a teacher. When newspapers were still making money, I worked with dozens of college interns, who spent the summer learning the difference between college courses and the real world. In Salisbury, I also hired and tutored dozens of beginning reporters. I'm proud to say I've stayed in touch with many of those reporters after they moved onto larger newspapers or other professions and prospered.

I have worked with young people all my life, as a Scout leader, Sunday school teacher and mentor in the Rowan-Salisbury School System's "school buddy" program. My wife and I also helped our two children and our granddaughter learn to read, write, compute and tackle more complex subjects.

I enjoy seeing the light go on when a student, intern or young reporter begins to understand a subject or learns a new way of interviewing, researching or writing. I enjoy going or a reporter's story sentence by sentence, with the reporter sitting beside me. I also find I learn something from all the young people I work with. I certainly learn a lot about technology but also new music, the new "hip" ways of talk and the ideas that are important to their generation.

I was born in the small town of Saluda, S.C., on a working beef-cattle farm," less...