June 3, 1996 was a major milestone in my life and career. It wasn't the first time an article of mine was published in a newspaper, since I had an unpaid internship at the New York Post two summers earlier. It wasn't even the first time The Star-Ledger had published an article of mine, which is a story I'll get to in a moment.
But it was the first time the Ledger published a story of mine when I was on staff there, the true start of what would be a 14-year professional relationship that was beyond anything I could have dreamed about while growing up reading the paper.
In the final months of my senior year of college, I applied to various newspapers around the country. When I assembled my clips package to send to the Ledger, I included not only articles I'd written for the college paper, but print-outs of certain posts I'd written for my now-defunct NYPD Blue fansite. Online entertainment journalism barely existed at this point, so those printouts did more to catch the attention of Ledger features editor extraordinaire Susan Olds than any of the traditional clips.
She invited me in for an interview, and while we were chatting, I noticed that on her desk were VHS screeners of the ABC miniseries Dead Man's Walk, adapted from the fourth book in Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove series. Susan wanted someone on staff to interview McMurtry and the miniseries' writer Diana Ossana, but hadn't assigned it yet. I mentioned that the original Lonesome Dove was at the time my favorite and most re-read book(*), and she decided to test me out. I fanboyed out a little on the call with McMurtry and Ossana, but the actual article came out well enough that Susan offered me a paid summer features internship. It wasn't a staff job, but left unspoken was the idea that if I that a full-time position might follow if I performed up to expectations.