Martin Luther King said “I have a dream” in 1963, Steve Kowch who grew up in the 1960s also had a dream. Chasing it to a forty year long career as a reporter was his way of bringing to reality what a journalist wants to achieve.
“I will tell you all kinds of terrible things that your professors here won’t tell you about,” said Steve Kowch, in a speech to journalism students at Centennial College Tuesday.
The seasoned radio and newspaper journalist was invited to speak to budding young journalists about working in the media and how to achieve their dreams in the harsh realities of budget cuts in newspapers and mass lay-offs in news companies.
Steve Kowch is the author of ’99 Things You Wish You Knew Before Making It Big in Media’. The book is a step-by-step guideline to succeeding in the highly competitive field of journalism. Brimming with anecdotes and inspirational quotes, Steve Kowch’s speech was not that different from a read of the book itself.
Using an analogy of Ccomparing journalists to chefs, Steve Kowch illustrated how the chef’s preparation of a sumptuous meal is similar to a journalist putting together a well-researched story.
“Chefs all work on the same recipe in a restaurant,” Kowch said. “The difference is what you do with the ingredients of the meal you are putting together.”
Just like how Kowch started off his best-selling book, Kowch explained how this “difference” comes down to having both talent and a positive attitude.
“ He told third-year journalism students that “Bbroadcasters are born, they are not taught, but it takes a lot of hard work, a lot of dedication and it takes a dream,.” he told third-year journalism students.
Having spent over forty years in the media, Kowch proves to Centennial students that it is possible to maintain the same passion a journalist has when he first enters the job.
Using his own success stories, Kowch encourages the audience to be brave enough to prove to employers even on their first job that they have what it takes to excel in assignments.
Telling a story of how he refused to be called “office-boy” two weeks after starting work as an intern at a newspaper company in 1968, he illustrated how he overturned a negative office culture at seventeen years of age.
Kowch started a “club” amongst other interns to begin a campaign of refusing to answer to commands from the boss unless he started calling them by their real names. His name was always the first to be picked when the boss resorted to pulling out their name cards on the walls. “You are the big shot,” Kowch was told at the time,
Kowch achieved his dream of being a reporter by never believing in “No” or “You can’t do it”.
“I believed in I will do it and I will prove you wrong that I can’t,” he said.
To rise up in an environment where 15,000 newspaper reporters were laid off from a pool of 56,000 in the States in the past few years is hard.
However, Kowch has a remedy to this. He reminds the audience to take on a positive approach and to always be reminded of why they got into the job in the first place.
To be great every day at what we do is Kowch’s way of beating the competition and standing above the crowd.
“All you have to do is chase your dream and do your job,” he said.
Being a reporter who up to this day is “only interested in writing page one stories”, Kowch is living proof of the myth that dreams never die.
In forty years he has risen up from being an office boy who fetched newspaper editors coffees to being the national director of the news talk format for Canada’s largest private broadcaster.
He made a difference by having a dream, and he told students, they could too.
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