At the age of 33, Joe Eaton has seen and done more than many people twice his age. The soft-spoken Michigan native has worked both as a teacher and a journalist, and has lived in Korea and both coasts of the United States. His work as been published in numerous newspapers across the country, including USA Today.

            Eaton moved to Blacksburg after earning his master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. He presently works for the Roanoke Times as a police and courts reporter.

            The following is an excerpt from an interview with Eaton, recorded Oct. 10, 2005:
           
Q: I was going to ask you where you went to undergraduate [school], but it says here you went to Michigan. Were you born in Michigan?

Eaton: Yeah, I was born in Michigan. [I] grew up in Michigan.

Q: How did you end up all the way over in Maryland?

Eaton: Well, I went from Michigan to Korea to Oregon to Maryland. Now I’m here.

Q. Why did you go to Korea?

Eaton: I taught English in Korea for about six years. I studied English as an undergrad… I’ve reported on and off for probably the last seven years, but this is my first daily, solid, newspaper job.

Q: Did you have much media experience before graduate school?

Eaton: Well, you know, I did quite a lot of freelance work. I worked for a year at a monthly called the Oregon Health Forum. I wrote about health problems. I freelanced for a paper in Oregon called the Asian Reporter, which was a lot of fun. What else did I do? …I wrote for a very small weekly called the Northwest Examiner.

Q: How did you end up in Oregon? You’ve traveled all over the place.

Eaton: Well… When I came back from Korea [my wife and I] moved to Michigan, and we didn’t really like it. So I had a job interview out in California, and I was pretty sure I was going to take [it] because it was a reporting job at the daily paper out in Tracy. So we packed up all our stuff in the car and we drove out to California.

I got the job, but we just hated the place. We were looking around for a place to live, and we were both kind of down on it. We were staying at a hotel, and someone broke into my car and stole my camera equipment. I was like, “[expletive] this place man, let’s get out of here.”

So I had a friend living in Portland, and he was like, “Hey, you can stay with us.” So we drove up there. After California, Portland just seemed like paradise, so we ended up staying and I found a job there.

Q: Before returning to school for your masters…you said you worked for the Oregon Health Forum and the Asian Reporter. Why was it important for you to go back to school even though you already had jobs?

Eaton: Well…as you probably know, journalism is a pretty competitive industry, especially the daily newspaper journalism. So, when I first came back from Korea and decided to be a reporter, I really had no idea what that meant. For example, when I first came back I walked right into The Detroit Free Press and was like, “Alright, here I am.

I’m ready. I’m ready to be a reporter,”

They were like  “Ha ha, do you have any clips?”

I was like, “No, not really, but I can write,” You know? I studied English. Anyone can be a reporter. So, I learned pretty quickly how competitive it is.

I think just because I wanted to move up in the industry, and the contacts of graduate school, and just to kind of spend some time and get better at reporting: that’s why I went back to school.

Q:  Why did you decide to become a reporter after being a teacher?

Eaton: When I was in Korea, one way I kept in contact with life here was the International Herald Tribune and the Economist Magazine, two English publications that are widely available in Asia… I knew I wanted to write, and I knew I wanted to travel, and I’m interested in people…so, it just seemed like a good way to put that all together… I wanted something that’s active and more independent, and reporting just fit that.

Q: Presently you write for both the Roanoke Times and USA today…w
hat are some of the differences between working for different newspapers?

Eaton: Well, what I did was when I was in graduate school I was an intern at USA Today in the features department, and from there I had a temporary job working during the election, which was really cool, but it [only] lasted a few months. From there I came to the Roanoke Times.

The difference… USA Today of course has a huge work force and a beautiful building in Northern Virginia that’s just fantastic. Working for USA Today, you would write a story and get calls and e-mails from Nevada saying, “Wow, I really liked your story,” but there really wasn’t the connection that there is here in Roanoke. Like, if I write a story here I can come to work in the morning and someone can be waiting for me in the lobby, either angry or happy. There’s just a much stronger connection with the community here.

You have to work a lot harder here. You’re forced to write way more. At USA Today I’d work on a story for three weeks; it was great. Here I’ll write five or six stories a week. That’s probably the biggest difference.

Editing at USA Today is much…I don’t want to say stronger editing, because that would say that my editors here aren’t good. They are good, but they’re editing way more stories. They’re much busier, whereas [at USA Today] you’d have one editor working with you for a long time on a story. Plus, I don’t know, at USA Today there’s the feeling of being the largest circulation newspaper in the country. There’s a certain pride there I think.

Q: You covered one of the strangest stories I’ve ever heard. It was a story about a figure from my childhood. I owned his action figure as a kid: the Million Dollar Man. He became a preacher… That had to have been kind of bizarre, since I’m sure you knew him from wrestling?

Eaton: Yeah, I was more a fan of the Junk Yard Dog, but…yeah, that’s one of my favorite stories that I’ve written for the Roanoke Times. I’m a police and courts reporter, that’s what I do here, but I kind of think I’m a better features reporter than I am a police and courts reporter. I really had fun with that.

I’m not a Christian myself, but I grew up Catholic. I was more interested in [The Christian Men’s Movement] and this idea of the worse you were in the past, then better evangelical Christian you can be today. That just intrigued me, how if you were a straight shooter from day one and you were just like, “I was always a good guy, you know. Maybe I sold insurance or something, and then I found Jesus.” That’s not a very compelling story.

The Million Dollar Man, he was out there doing drugs and all kinds of illicit sex …You know, the people who were watching weren’t really interested in Jesus that much. They were interested in, like,”[expletive] man, this is the Million Dollar Man,” you know? It was kind of a weird environment. That was fun.

Q: The cities and towns of the New River Valley are all fairly small and calm. Does the size and the character of these cities effect what you consider news worthy?

Eaton: Yeah…If someone gets murdered here, it’s a big deal. Even an accidental death or a fatal car crash can be a big deal. Sometimes it will be a on the front page. I kind of had the realization a couple of weeks ago. I happened to buy the [Washington Post] on a Saturday, and I opened it and they had briefed three murders over the weekend. The brief is like those short little captions inside the paper… Three people murdered in one story and it was three paragraphs. I was like “Whoa.” …If three people were murdered here, we’d write about it for a month. It would be on the front page forever. But this place… there’s a lot of weird stuff going on here, like the Million Dollar Man Thing. If you get out of Blacksburg and Christiansburg you can find some pretty out there stuff.

Q: You wrote a story for U.S.A Today on take home drug tests. You also attended an addictions study program for journalists. Is drug use an important issue to you, or were you just assigned these two stories?

Eaton: How that happened was that the U.S.A Today story came out of the conference. When I was at the conference I met this doctor. She dealt with kids, drugs, and addiction… We happened to be talking afterwards… and she starts talking about this thing called the Whizzinator. It’s a fake penis people have to fake their drug tests. I was like, “No way, no way.”  So she started telling me stories about people taking their drug tests with the Whizzinator, and then she started telling me about mail order drug tests that parents were giving to their kids. That just was intriguing to me, this idea of if I were a parent and I thought my kid was using drugs, would I do that? Then through searching for it on the internet, I found that… it was a kind of cat and mouse game, where the same companies are selling both the drug tests to the parents and things to beat the drug tests to the kids. That’s how that came about. I like that one too. That’s one of my better ones.

Q: As a police reporter for [The Roanoke Times], you have to write about some pretty grisly stories. For instance, I read one of your stories about six children killed in an explosion. Is it hard to be objective and neutral when writing these types of stories?

Eaton: What do you mean by that? What do you mean objective and neutral?

Q: I mean… say it’s reported that somebody gets murdered. It’s so clear that the guy did it, but you still have to stay neutral and can’t be convicting of him at all.

Eaton: Yeah, it is. You know what’s harder is making an interesting story and leaving that bit out. My editor and I go back and forth quite a bit on that…I’m probably more conservative than he is. Even when someone gets convicted of something I’ll write “John Smith was convicted of first degree murder in the death of John Fred Sampson,” where he’ll change it to “John Smith was convicted of killing John,”  you know what I mean? He’s much stronger… There’s a struggle between writing a good story, like “person A went over and killed person B with a hatchet,” and trying to be objective.

More difficult though is that I just don’t like that stuff. Like last week a photographer and I went to a scene where a three or five-year-old girl had been shot accidentally by her father in the head when his gun went off. So we’re standing out there…and they’re wheeling the girl out on a gurney type thing; they’re putting her in the hearse…and I’m thinking, “How do I go up and talk to this family? What do I really say to these people, and what can I expect them to say to me?” I’m not really good at that. I’m not really good at walking up to someone and saying, “So, Hi, I’m Joe and I’m a reporter at the Roanoke Times. I’m really sorry about what happened to your daughter, but can you tell me how it happened?” I don’t like that.

Q: Do people ever get angry with you for the way you handle those kind of stories?

Eaton: Yeah, all the time. Like, I wrote a story about a kid getting killed on a four-wheeler…It was too big for her…It flips over and crushes her. She doesn’t die, but it’s on her chest and she can’t breathe and she eventually dies. I described how it happened, and I probably got 100 calls and e-mails from people saying, “Why did you do that? It sounds like you’re blaming the parents for this.” So yeah, all the time. They come in angry sometimes too.

Q: How important is a reader’s opinion to you when you’re writing a story…do you get worried that they’re going to get angry about what you’re writing?

Eaton: Yeah, because I don’t like it…Again, I think I told you I’m more of a features writer. I kind of want to entertain people like with the drug test story or some other stories that you read and say, “Wow, that’s interesting.”

I worry more about people in the story. Sometimes they will call and be angry. For example, the girl who died when the thing flipped on her, her mom called and said, “The rescue member told me that that’s not how she died, that she died some different way.” Obviously this rescue worker was just trying to help her feelings and say that she died immediately [and] that she didn’t feel any pain. So for me to write that story and then cause those people that pain… I don’t like that. You almost have to just turn that off and write the story as it happened… then just try to deal with it afterwards.

Q: Not all of the stories you write are that dark; you get to write a lot of lighthearted ones. I read one about items that people leave behind in hotel rooms. That got me thinking, “How do you get word of a story like that?” I wouldn’t think somebody would call in and be like, “Hey I’ve got this hot tip. Somebody left a wok on a toilet seat.”

Eaton: It’s funny, because I’d been carrying that story around with me for like two years. I was in a job interview in Atlanta, and I was staying at a hotel there. I happened to be talking to this hotel owner, and for some reason we got to talking about things people leave behind.…So I had been telling my editor for a long time the story about the Atlanta thing, and one of these days I was going to go around to all the hotels here and ask them what the craziest thing they had was.

Then one day it came up. He said, “We don’t have any stories for the paper tomorrow; there’s no crime going on outside. Why don’t you go do your hotel story?”  So I just went around and talked to different people at the hotels, and that’s how that happened. That’s more of the [type of] story that I enjoy writing.

Q: There was an incident covered by The Roanoke Times about a bag full of burnt Korans found at a mosque. The event got a lot of national coverage, and your article and the follow-up you wrote about it got a lot of attention too for breaking the story. Did having a major story like that… help your career any?

Eaton: Yeah…It’s a funny industry… Everyone is trying to get their stories to be the biggest stories out there. What’s interesting about that story is that it turned out in the end that it wasn’t a hate crime… The police were angry with me about that story. They were like “Why are you calling this a possible hate crime?”
           
Either it is a hate crime or it isn’t a hate crime. You’re pushing ahead of the news when you say it’s a possible hate crime. It’s like if someone dies in the street and you say it’s a possible murder, and they had a point there. It was such a sensitive issue at the time that we thought, “Ok, go ahead with that.” But that one turned out that it was not a hate crime. It was someone who was returning his Korans.

Q: What are your plans for the future? Where would you ultimately like to end up in your career?

Eaton: I like long-form, narrative journalism. In my next job I’d like to get a features job… at a larger paper where I can kind of write more about people and less about crime and do more quirky stories. Then from there I’d like to someday work for a magazine and write books. I guess my dream job, like the dream of all dreams, is the New Yorker.

Q: Finally, what advice would you give to a college student like myself who’s trying to get into the media business?

Eaton: I don’t know. I guess it would really depend on that person. If a person wanted to do the kind of work that I do, I’d say go for it.

I think you have to go into it with your eyes open and realize what it is. It’s poorly paid. You work a lot of hours. It can be hard …For example, last Friday I was supposed to go see someone play guitar at open mic night at 6:00. I told my wife, “I’ll pick you up at 5:30 and we’ll go.” Well at 5:30 I had to call her and say, “Someone got hit by a train…so I’m probably not going to be home until 10:00.” That happens probably twice a week. I don’t have kids, but if I did I think it would be real hard to do that, you know, to have that kind of life. You need to think about what it really is I guess.

Q: Well, that’s all I have for you. Thank you very much for sitting down with me.

Eaton: You’re welcome. No problem. It’s harder to answer questions than it is to ask them.