TMW: You graduated from Macalester in 1978. Can you talk a little bit about what brought you to Mac and your experience here?

I went to a small school outside of Chicago and Macalester was a popular destination, especially for those of us who weren’t interested in going to school close to home or out east. There were about 40 students in my graduating class and three of us came to Macalester—and there were already three or four more on campus. We were kind of a posse.

What did your posse do for fun in those days? Anything about Macalester in the 70s that would surprise or interest students today?

You know, there are more similarities than difference—socially, politically and academically. Macalester is a more academically intense school than it was when I attended; the acceptance rate was very high. But the stuff I see going on is pretty similar. Springfest, intramurals, political protests and things we probably shouldn’t talk about now that I’m a grown-up. We had most everything but social media, so we could keep our secrets for a little longer. You should also know that my IM broomball and volleyball teams would kick the crap out of your teams today. We were good.

Now you teach News Reporting and Writing at Mac. What led you back to Macalester and how does it feel to be back here in a different role?

Well, now I have keys to places I used to have to sneak into. I’m only two professors removed from my journalism professor at Macalester, the great George Moses. His successor passed away and I received a call asking if I would be interested in teaching. I’d taught a J-Term class in 1990 when I was on parenting leave from my job at the Star Tribune. Coming back to teach is the best possible connection to Macalester that I can imagine. Having skills and knowledge that I can share in an academic environment with really good students who are really interesting people, that’s a little bit like winning the Powerball.

What places did you used to sneak into as a student?

No comment. OK, a bit of a comment. The library used to be in Weyerhauser and I owed enough in library fines at one point that I needed to get a bit creative in the way that I borrowed books. I’m not sharing the methods, however, and I returned everything that I borrowed. Just not when it was due from time to time to time.

You work full-time as Digital Sports Editor at startribune.com. What have you found to be most rewarding and challenging about this position?

Parts of the job change every month, if not more quickly, and learning new methods and ways of doing things is an ongoing and fun challenge.

What do you think people find most disconcerting about the changes in newspaper?

The beauty of internet journalism is that it’s a limitless frontier. The curse of Internet journalism is trying to be as fast as possible with the news while adhering to the standards that set us about from those trafficking in rumor and incomplete reports. Too many news organizations make too many mistakes, and our job is to balance speed with caution—and sometimes that frustrates our readers.

Has there been a defining moment in your life that made you decide to take the direction in life that you did?

I came to Macalester with little idea of what I wanted to do. It’s probably a good thing that things happened the way they did, because if I’d dreamed of becoming a journalist when I was in high school, I probably would have been looking at a different set of colleges. I’ve been able to do a lot of different things in journalism—writing about sports, writing about higher education, some magazine writing, radio, an assortment of editing jobs. My professional career has sort of been the media equivalent of a liberal arts college.

What do you like to do in your free time?

Free time? What’s that? I coached AAU [Amateur Athletic Union] basketball when my son was younger and I’m still not shy about going to a good high school or small college game just to watch. About seven or eight of the kids I coached went on to play college basketball, and I tried to see all of them play once or twice. (One of them helped rob a bank, but that’s another story.) I’m a bit of a tech geek and I read and I listen to music and I go to a lot of movies and Minnesota Twins games. Free time pretty much disappears during the fall when I teach, and I pretty much spend January recovering from doing a job-and-a-half. But the truth is that I like my day job and teaching enough that I don’t really divide my life into free time and whatever the other stuff is called.

If you hadn’t gone into journalism, what might you have done?

I’d be the hip-hop artist known as Brother Sez Who.