Martin: I remember being about five or six years old and loving to talk to and in front of people, being naturally curious and asking questions. It started there. I also remember being a kid and watching the news anchors on [Boston’s] Channel 4. I don’t want to say it was an obsession, but it was something that I was definitely drawn to. When I was in high school—I went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin School—I was part of WRLS, the radio station there. I was the newscaster, which was a lot of fun.

Yes, absolutely. And I’m hoping that as a professor at COM I’ll be able to help students recognize and nurture their gifts. I think that’s where you gain the most success: doing the things that you’re good at.

I covered the Sandy Hook school shootings, so that was very eye-opening. In the news, we cover very tragic situations—but being there from the very first scanner call until three weeks into the funerals has really stuck with me. I recognized then that journalists aren’t robots, we’re humans, and we have an important role to play. I think if we play it in the right way, we’ll be able to tell stories that will impact and affect other people.

Allow yourself to feel whatever feelings you have. Sometimes we’re so focused on the job that we suppress many things. If you are sad, or if something touched you in a particular way, it’s okay to have that emotion. Once your day is over, you spend time with your friends and family, you meditate, you pray, or whatever it is that you do, and allow yourself to be okay with having a feeling. One of the most important things we can do as journalists is recognize we are also people.

The value comes from having some kind of connection. I actually am from Cambridge, so that was an asset. I knew the area, the community and the players. My contribution to the coverage was with a family that had lost their home and they got a new apartment. It was right before Christmas, and they had a Christmas tree and nothing else. We sat on the floor and we had a conversation. I learned a little more about that family, and I was able to translate that to the story. That’s part of our job, being able to relate to people, connect with people, take the information we’re given and relay it to other people so they can also connect. We have that opportunity much more in local journalism, because you may see those people again when something else happens in Cambridge. It’s important to have those relationships.

I’ll describe it like this: When I go to Baskin Robbins, I want 31 different flavors, I don’t want 31 of one flavor. The world doesn’t look just one way. It’s full of all different kinds of people with all different kinds of stories, and you have to have some exposure to them. There are so many stories out there that need to be told, and journalists have a great opportunity to tell those stories, to expose people to a slice of life that they otherwise may not know anything about.

That was one of the things I loved about NPR and PBS; we do many national stories, and there might be a national story that we localize. I hope that’s something that students embrace. We have classrooms of all kinds of people, and hopefully they have interests in all kinds of different things, and they can tell those stories in ways that are interesting, accurate and that will inform listeners, viewers and readers.

I see so many different kinds of journalists, and that makes me hopeful: people who speak different languages, people who are from different parts of the world. Knowing there are students coming into Boston University who are excited about the field, that makes me very hopeful.

As far as concerns, we have a political climate right now that includes attacks on journalists. But that tells me how important journalism is. I think if you have the fortitude—and you need internal fortitude to do this job—you’ll be fine. You’ll be able to survive the attacks on so-called fake news. But we won’t be doing fake news at BU.