The Columbian files Tom Vogt, in blue, is honored by a veterans group for his many stories on military veterans and their service to America. Photo Gallery
You may have seen those surveys that say being a newspaper reporter is one of the worst jobs you can have, along with hard-rock mining or working as logger. I don’t believe that myself.
But the fact is, these days most journalists launch their reporting careers right out of college. Yet within a decade, most of them will have moved on to a different career. They find jobs that are less stressful, don’t require evening and weekend work, and pay much better. Many of them go to work for the government or in public relations. Some have gone on to graduate school to become lawyers or teachers. We have even had a courts reporter who became a private investigator for a local law firm.
That’s why Friday was a significant day for our newsroom. After more than 44 years at The Columbian, Tom Vogt retired. Oh, he might have a last story or two to finish, and it will take a while to clean out the heaps of paper on his desk and even on the floor around him, but he’s officially decided that work is getting in the way of living his life.
Saying that he is a legend isn’t a big enough superlative. When the word got out that Tom was retiring, I got calls from Vancouver city hall and the county council’s office asking for his biography so that they could honor him. What a rarity for anyone in the news business! Look no further than the president to see that it’s generally open season on journalists. So these are extraordinary honors.
Here’s what I told them: Tom is a native of Tacoma and went to Washington State University in Pullman to study journalism. After graduation he and his wife, Kathy, settled in Vancouver where she taught music for many years in the Vancouver Public Schools.
Tom started here in 1974 and has worked his entire career as a reporter, something few people ever get the opportunity to do. For the first half of his career he worked in our Sports department, and for the last approximately 20 years he worked on the Metro team, covering education and, in later years, general assignments including history, Fort Vancouver and military and veterans affairs.
His editors mostly have been smart enough to let him write about whatever he damn well pleases, because it will result in an interesting, well-reported story. I know I wasn’t going to try to turn him into a database reporter, or have him cover night cops, though he actually has done stories in both of those genres. I do confess to having pressed him into service regularly to help edit stories and assist reporters when we had needs. And many Columbian reporters, past and present, will tell you they showed a first draft of their story to him, and he made it better, before they ever turned it in to me.
Another thing to know is that Tom’s stories were incredibly accurate. A few years ago we started keeping track of corrections written by reporters in an attempt to spot and correct accuracy problems. One year the average number of corrections per reporter was something like 12. Tom had two, and at least one of them was because a source mistakenly gave him the wrong information.
Tom has been a mentor, resource and unofficial editor to all of us. His love of finding and telling a good story, after more than 44 years of good stories, is inspirational. I will really miss working with him every day and you, our readers, will miss him too.
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