Reporting History
You’re a professional journalist – too old to be green, too young to be seasoned – and you land the dream job: a reporter for the New York Times. You go to New York City and are only partially through orientation when you’re dispatched to cover the civil rights movement. You relocate your spouse and two young children from Little Rock to Atlanta, and then spend most of your time on the road because even though there are plenty of things to cover in Georgia, the big story is in Alabama because it’s February of 1965 and although you don’t know it yet, you’re about to become a pivotal part of history. This was Roy Reed’s introduction to working for the New York Times after two years in the U.S. Air Force and nearly a decade at the Arkansas Gazette.