graduate? So I looked for a course that required only A political science degree required four math subjects—how could I one math subject, and that’s how I landed in journalism, making me an accidental journalist. When I took Louie Beltran’s class I had no desire to become a journalist. But his recollections of his days as a newspaperman made journalism seem like such fun. In Journalism 102 he just scared the living hell out of his students. But that was the turning point in my professional life. The semester was halfway through, and all we’d ever gotten from Beltran were insults and cusswords. No one in our class could do anything right. Beltran brought us to the headquar- ters of the Western Police District and left us there, telling us to find our own stories. “You learn about real life in a police station,” he told us. “That’s where you encounter criminals, lowlifes, all sorts of unsavory characters.” Another time, he made us attend the hearings of the Agrava Commission investigating the assassination of Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. The hearings were held at the Social Security System building. Our assignment was to write an atmosphere lede. At our next class he called on me. “Soho! To the board!” My first sentence went, “Inside the air-conditioned conference room of the Social Security System….” I hadn’t even finished writing the sentence when he said, “Look at what Soho is doing! That is what you shouldn’t do.” He said that by writing out “Social Security System” I had bored the reader in the very first sentence.
I erased that sentence. Luckily, I had prepared another lede. During the hearing I’d noticed people sleeping through the
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