JOURNALIST: It's not a job, it's a lifestyle

I am a journalist. I should be on the federal endangered species list.

Journalism is all I know to keep myself engaged and happy. I hate to sleep because it takes away from my time as a journalist and because I have to wait until the morning to go back to work, like a kid waiting for Christmas morning.

I would go on vacation but I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t have internet access 24/7/365.

I have ADD, ADHD, OCD, boredom and only journalism can exorcise my demons.

I have tried to be happy blending my life with a job, but at the end of the day, everything else I’ve ever done was for the money.

I am a journalist. It is not a job, it is a lifestyle.

People say you should not identify yourself with your job.

The people who say that don’t like their jobs.

God gave me the ability to put words together with ease, to be curious, to stand up for what I believe, to present facts and stand behind them no matter the costs.

I was blessed to work for other journalists who taught me how to be a professional when I was a young, stupid, kid with long hair and holes in his jeans.

They overcame my stubbornness and bathed me in warm, wonderful knowledge. Judy, Brent, Joe, Laurie, Steve, Larry, Neal, Eric and others who were willing to beat it into me – or out of me.

And I worked the hours, covering street races after midnight; in a saloon to find out about a baboon heart transplant, in an alfalfa field where the water was contaminated; in a coroner’s lab when he verified a little girl was molested after she died; in a copse of 27 crosses, some taller than myself, off the steep side of a highway where that many high school kids had died; at the moving Vietnam Wall, well into darkness when some veterans could manage to emotionally visit when no one else was there. I’ve been in Charles Manson’s bus, in a hot air balloon, I covered the Rose Parade, the Rose Bowl, the Rams, Lakers, Dodgers, Raiders, The Annies, JPL, the Governator; met presidents, generals, felons, celebrities. The Army detained me for 13 hours after I covered a war game that went wrong. I was beaten up by referees who screwed a bunch of high school basketball players and wrote the story with a TRS80 from my hospital bed, typing with one finger. They were CHP officers and were fired – and so was I because the editor’s daughter was dating one of them.

I stepped over bodies on the street at the worst traffic accident in the history of the region. I worked with cops to meet with a schemer who extorted money from 200 men who just wanted to play tackle football on the weekends. Met him under the bleachers at a college hoping to God the cops would get to me before the bad guys did.

There are countless other events and people that have fueled my instinct to get the next story, to pull back the veils, to chase the roaches back under the baseboards, and to bring the heroic into the light.

I’ve won more awards than some newspapers, had three laws passed because of my work and was a witness in three major civil suits that affected the safety of countless Californians. All while a handful of people cursed me, threatened me, beat me and tried to run me out of town.

And I am proudest that all my exclusives never fell in my lap. I wasn’t the guy who happened to pick up the phone. I was a grinder, I have to know what’s under the rock, what makes people tick, what their story is. I ask the right questions, dug for the right paperwork, cheated, lied, flirted, threatened and bribed to get the verifiable information I needed.

I do not apologize: I am a journalist.

It is my job to swim in the muck one day and soar with greatness the next. And no two days in 33 years have ever been the same. I have lived the life of three people because of where my assignments took me.

There are fewer and fewer of us left. And that’s why I can’t let the country’s growing ignorance and apathy stop me from doing what I do.

I wear the Scarlet Letter often with pride because that is my victory – OUR victory.

I have been blessed by God that I had the parents, the teachers, the editors, the colleagues, the curiosity, the instinct, the give-a-damn, the writing skills and just enough people who understand it and appreciate it.

I am a journalist, and I don’t care who likes it or not.

But when the government, or the attorneys, or the Bad Guys or the Big guys or The Man are standing on your throat, and you have no other recourse, I am the last guy you can call.

I am a dying breed and I will go down fighting the good fight.

I am Bull Durham’s Crash Harris, who was once in The Show and is now plying his trade in the minor leagues, chasing after a purity only he can understand.

And on my epitaph it should say: Here lies Vince Lovato, Husband, Father, Son, Journalist.