Prof. Smith in 500 Words

You can’t always get what you want? Says who?

I wanted to be a musician, so I got a degree in music.

I wanted to be a journalist, so I worked 20 years for daily newspapers.

I wanted to write for The New York Times, so I landed a job as a freelance for them.

I wanted to live at the beach for a while, so I got a job at the St. Pete Times.

I wanted to spend a year in Paris, so I got a fellowship at the largest J school in France.

I wanted to study law, so I got a scholarship to Yale Law School.

Not that any of it was handed to me on a silver platter. I grew up in an ordinary middle-class household that included two parents, three siblings, a parade of pets and a lot of noise.

We didn’t have a dishwasher. That was a chore the kids did by hand. We didn’t have central air. Box fans got us through summers in North Carolina. We didn’t have a color TV. My parents wanted to save us from that particular addiction.

What we had was music. Lots of music.

Because my father was a drummer in his younger life, jazz and classical music formed our family’s soundtrack. His musical obsession meant we had a hi-fidelity stereo with $400 speakers and one of the finest professional-grade tape players ever made.

Instruments that found their way into our house included various coronets and trumpets, several saxophones and clarinets, a flute and an oboe, a snare drum and a trombone, a hulking upright piano and a full set of jazz-style drums. My father came home with a guitar one day, so I learned to play that, too.

My mother didn’t have a musical bone in her body, but she had ink in her veins. Her claim to fame as a journalist was that she landed an exclusive jailhouse interview with Velma Barfield before the state executed Barfield by lethal injection. Growing up in Cary, the first job I ever had was, naturally, at The Cary News.

After graduating with a music degree in 1986, I immediately began transforming myself into a journalist with an entry-level job at the Winston-Salem Journal. In 1990, I made the leap to The Charlotte Observer, then the largest newspaper between Washington and Atlanta. There I stayed for 14 years.

Except when I left and came back a year at a time — for Paris, for Florida, for Yale. I’m easily bored, I suppose, so my career at the Observer was actually three in one: as an arts writer, as a copy editor and, finally, as assistant world and national editor.

Bored again, I left the newsroom for the last time in 2006. I spent the next six years studying, teaching and earning a doctoral degree from the journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill. From that cocoon, I emerged an award-winning legal historian and a devoted instructor of media law, First Amendment history and journalism.

It's what I wanted. And I got it.