Thomas Lake, a celebrated journalist who has written for publications such as Atlanta Magazine and Sports Illustrated, made a visit to Professor Matt J. Duffy’s 8 a.m. Introduction to Media Writing class on Thursday, November 19, to discuss his background, experience, and writing process with students.
The class had read one of Lake’s stories at the beginning of the semester: “The Last Heavy Footfalls of Doc Hullender,” a piece published in Atlanta Magazine in May 2009 focusing on Michael Hullender, a soldier who was killed in Iraq in 2007. Lake began his lecture by explaining how he had initially decided to report on Hullender, and why.
Lake first heard the story of Hullender while he was working for The St. Petersberg Times in Tampa, Fl. Lake is originally from Decatur, Ga. and had known Hullender while they were growing up. Hullender’s story strongly interested Lake, but there was no market in Florida for a story about a Georgia kid.
By a stroke of luck, however, Atlanta Magazine offered to pay Lake to do the story. Because of his personal connection to the subject of the piece, he described the process of investigating and writing Hullender’s story to be an emotional one. Lake described an “electric, tingly feeling” in attempting to convey how he felt while working on the Hullender piece.
Following his introduction, Lake engaged the class in a brief writing exercise in order to demonstrate to students how to identify this feeling. Students were instructed to take five minutes to write about a personal experience that gave them goose bumps when they thought about it.
After students were finished writing they were invited to share with the class. Ivy Bailey chose to share her experience, which centered on morning formation as a soldier in California.
Afterwards, students were invited to ask questions in a mock news conference setting. Most of the questions centered on generating ideas, research, inspiration, and background.
Lake encouraged students to do as much research as possible when working on important pieces. One of his methods, termed “iceberg note-taking,” involved gathering more information that one could possibly use.
He described his experiences while doing research for “The Good People of Dalton Would Like Jobs Now, Please,” an article that took him six weeks and over 100 pages of notes on Microsoft Word to write. He used methods as simple as searching the popular database Nexis-Lexis to look-up interview subjects, and even had the mayor personally drive him around on a tour of the town. What Lake stressed the most, however, was honesty, integrity and always speaking with “authority and confidence.”
Lake was born in Georgia and later moved to up-state New York. He was one of six, with three brothers and two sisters, homeschooled by his mother and his father, who was a pastor. He described himself as always being a story-teller and lover and, as a child, one of his favorite things to do was go to the library to check-out books.
After high-school, he attended Herkimer County Community College and later transferred to Gordon College in Boston, Mass. He began his journalism career at The Press-Sentinal, a twice-weekly publication in Jesup, Ga. He currently lives in Atlanta, Ga. with his wife, and the couple are expecting their first child in May.
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