Award-winning journalist Ted Decker offered some sage advice to a room full of young journalists: always carry a pencil; Ohio weather can freeze ink in a pen and smear ink carefully jotted in a reporter notebook on a rainy day.
And he didn’t stop there.
“Try to write one truly great sentence in every single story you write, no matter how dull or short or rushed it is. Make that one sentence sing,” said
Decker, a visiting guest of the journalism department’s Lunch and Learn series.
Decker spent 31 years as a print journalist, working for newspapers in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and finally Ohio, where he spent the last 17 years of his newspaper career at The Columbus Dispatch.
Working as a cops reporter and later a metro columnist, Decker said he covered everything from mass shootings and pervasive gun violence to the relentless toll taken by hurricanes on rural, poor southern communities to waxing poetic about slam dancing and Beavis and Butt-Head.
“There are only two stories that should run longer than 18 inches,” Decker said to students as he discussed keeping an article interesting to the reader, “the second coming of Christ and a good fishing story.”
Decker spent years covering crime in Columbus, Ohio, for the Dispatch and joined Denison in 2023 as a senior marketing writer. He emphasized that he approaches difficult and complicated stories by leading with compassion and meeting subjects where they are. This philosophy was used not only for crime, but other sensitive stories such as reporting that led to a federal bust of a human trafficking ring at a truck stop in Pennsylvania.
He did not cover only dark stories in his career. In fact, some of his readers’ favorite stories included reporting about the Juggalos at an annual gathering. The Juggalos are a group of fans for the band Insane Clown Posse. Although often mocked by people for their outward appearance, Decker took a different approach: “Punch up and not down.”
With the Juggalos, it would have been easy to mock and belittle; yet, he did the opposite. “I tried to understand this community,” he said. “I just went and listened to them and spent time with them.”
Decker won many state and even a few national awards along the way, including Best Columnist in Ohio in 2017 and a second-place National Headliner Award in 2023 for best local interest column writing. But Decker says that maybe the real awards were the people he met along the way.
“No, really,” he said. “The people are the cool part. Awards just clutter up the house.”
