Although a journalist, I remain a public policy addict who took undergraduate and graduate university courses in political science, political behavior, constitutional law, government budgeting and public administration.

It facilitates conversations with my wife who's graduate degree and professional experience are in the same fields.

I also am IBM professionally trained computer programmer who writes computer programs, manages network systems and has consulted news organization throughout the world on newsroom computer-systems.

I have been a government reporter on the federal and state level for almost my entire professional career and have won numerous national broadcast awards for documentary and investigative reporting on statehouse issues.

For nearly four decades, I've been the statehouse correspondent for the state's major all-news radio station, KMOX Radio in St. Louis.

Until my retirement, I'd been a tenured faculty member directing the State Government Reporting Program of the University of Missouri School of Journalism based in Jefferson City which I founded as faculty member of the school in 1972. In retirement, I have been awared status as an emeritus.

I created one of the world's first all-news websites Missouri Digital News which I continue to manage.

My students produced statehouse stories that were provided to newspaper, broadcast and online outlets throughout Missouri.

While as student in the JSchool, I reported for all of the school's daily newsrooms including my own statehouse news bureau (MDN), the Columbia Missourian, KOMU-TV, KBIA, and the school's Washingtion bureau where I also covered Congress for National Public Radio.

In 1972, I was appointed to the faculty of the Missouri School of Journalism to establish the school's State Government Reporting Program. Although I retired decades later, I continued to supervise students as an emeritus faculty member for the next few years.

My program became the school's first fully converged newsroom.

Just as importantly, my program taught students about public policy. My students interacted as journalists on a daily basis with legislators, statewide elected officials, agency heads, judges and lobbyists in covering stories for a wide array of outlets in Missouri.

As a result of that public-policy focus, many of my students ended up in careers involving law, public adminstration and, yes, political consulting.

I started my career as a broadcast journalist and have worked for KFRU Radio in Columbia, KLZ Radio/TV (now KMGH) in Denver and National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. where I covered Congress during the early stages of Watergate.

It was at NPR covering Congress that I made my biggest professional mistake, but also learned my most important lesson I have passed to my students.

Covering Congress for NPR in 1972, I missed what could have been a major major story Pres. Richard Nixon Watergate scandal. House Banking Committee Chair Wright Patman, one of my major sources, told me of information his committee staff had uncovered about how CREP (Pres. Richard Nixon's Committee to Relect the President) was laundering money through off-shore countries for Nixon's Watergate defendant payments.

I discounted his tip. No way, I thought, could the president's committee that included U.S. Attorney General John Mitchel be involved in such an illegal scheme. Beyond that, Patman was old enough that I distrusted what he was telling me.

Golly was I wrong. Patman's tip to me was proven in court. Mitchell landed And the Washington Post broke the story.

My failure to pursue that story led to a couple of major lessons I taught my journalism students to not discount something you're told, check it out. And don't dismiss information just because of the source's age or other demographic isssues.

As I also taught enerations of future journalists, mistakes can be powerful lessons. Yes, as I experienced, fear of a mistake can keep you awake for nights. But that fear also instills discipline to avoid mistakes.

While I was at NPR, the dean of the Missouri Journalism School recruited me to establish our state government reporting progam. The dean, the late Roy Fisher, recruited me to establish the school's State Government Reporting Program.

I had no interest in becoming a life-long academic. But Roy, a former hard-nosed Chicago newspaper editor, understood my feelings and had the national journalism contacts to make sure leaving DC would not be a career setback.

But each year, Roy didn't want me to leave and I was having too much fun working with Roy and with students covering the statehouse. Unlike what I found with the federal government, state government was not as dysfunctional and top government officials were far easier to access.

Beyond that, Roy encouraged me in pursue my own statehouse reporting for CBS's KMOX.

Besides, I enjoyed and learned from the regular calls I would get from Roy questioning my stories and those of my students. As a Pulitzer Prize winner, he always was on target from which I learned the need to be tough, aggressive and questioning.

In addition to my state government journalism responsibilities, I became very active in international journalism efforts. It began when Roy got me to accept a student in the renewal of the journalism-student exchange with China that had become dormant for years.

From that student I learned so much about how much perspective that student had from reporting from a near dictatorship. His stories about government awards for highway construction contracts were fantastic. He instinctively understood the special-interest corruption in Missouri because of what he had seen in China.

Immediately after collapse of the Iron Curtain, I became the first of my school's faculty to travel to Central Europe to assist development of journalism and journalism training in Eastern and Central Europe.

Subsequently, countries in which I have assisted journalism efforts include Bosnia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Hungary, India, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Mongolia, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan. I held a dual faculty positions with the University of Navarra School of Public Communication in Pamplona, Spain, and the International School of Media and Entertainment Studies in Dehli, India.

I led the University of Missouri Global Scholars program in Spain to help MU faculty partners better understand, among other issues, the conflict between between Christians and Moslems in the early years of Spain.

I helped found an international consortium of journalism schools to provide assistance to journalists and journalism educators in the Baltics and Poland. I also worked very closely with the journalism unions in southern Poland in development of a journalism support and training center.

Finally, I'm a computer system designer and programmer. Those efforts began when I developed the first newspaper pre-production computer system for a daily, general circulation newspaper. It's a completely Web-based system for news-story production and newsroom management for reporters anywhere in the world where the have Web access.

A few years later, I authored a research and development project with IBM that resulted in the largest research grant awarded to the University of Missouri system at that time. Through that project, I spent several years consulting with IBM, newspapers and newspaper system vendors on network and system design in the U.S. and Europe.

As part of those international computing efforts, I designed and installed the first journalism network system at the University of Navarra's Public Communication School under a grant from IBM Spain that I co-authored in collaboration with IBM Europe. [an error occurred while processing this directive]