I have worked at WFAA TV in Dallas for 23 years.

In that time I have worked as a reporter, News Manager, Assignment Manager and Anchor.

While a college education is most important in instilling book knowledge and history to a young journalist, an internship can provide them with real life experiences they can take with them through their entire career.

Working in a real newsroom, provides contacts for young people with key professionals and gives them the chance to see how circumstances can change how we cover stories.

Years ago, while a student at Madrid American High School at Torrejon Air Base just outside Madrid, Spain, I had just such an experience.

Our Cooperative Work Experience (Work Study) coordinator, Mr. Joseph Tullbane, managed to get me the internship at the English language radio station on base.

Essentially, I worked in the card catalogue department managing the large vinyl records that came into the station from the United States and helped keep the place tidy.

In exchange, the staff taught me how to operate equipment and coordinate wire service copy for newscasts. All news stories used to come into the radio station on large wire service machines (operated by Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters) that typed out what was going on around the world on long sheets of paper on spools that looked like paper towels. (They have now been replaced by computers.)

The spools of paper had to be cut and separated into different piles that were sorted to make newscasts.

I learned the basics of broadcasting from the men and women at AFN-Spain...how to re-write and time stories.

We had no school newspaper at the time so this afforded me my first opportunity to write, as well.

The key thing about this experience is it confirmed my interest in journalism...not so much television news (again, because we had no TV station) but the importance of information in a free society.

I loved the feeling of information passing from wire service sources around the world...through me and out to the surrounding community.

A couple of years later, when I was in college at Creighton University in Nebraska, I went back to Spain to visit my family for the Christmas holidays and worked again as an intern for the station. While in the newsroom on December 30th, 1973, a wire service bulletin (all bulletins came with ringing bells) announced that the man who was second-in-command to Francisco Franco, Admiral Carrero Blanco, had been assassinated in a massive bomb blast in Madrid, just 20 miles from us.

This was major breaking news and there had been no mention of it, anywhere in the country, as of yet! We could, I thought, be first to break the story!!!!

I quickly cut the paper off the wire machine, ran over and handed it to the announcer on duty (an Air Force Staff Sergeant) and said we needed to get it on right away.

His name, I do not remember, but to this day, I can remember seeing the color drain from his face as he read the paper I had given him.

He looked me straight in the eye and warned me to say nothing to anyone and stay away from the telephone.

He called someone on the phone and the next thing I knew we were playing classical music on air and nothing else...no announcers...no public service announcements (there were no commercials on American Forces Network stations)...just classical music.

This went on for hours, until the Spaniards broadcast the announcement over their own radio and television stations. Only after they released the information did we release the details of the killing that we had known for hours.

I later learned the Spanish government was afraid this was a coup attempt and wanted to get it troops in place before saying anything about the death.

That incident taught me the difference between even friendly countries and this one...and left me with a healthy respect for the importance of the job journalists do in informing people.

I would never have understood the full impact of that by simply reading it in a book.

The internship thrust me into the center of the event.

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