Michelle A Carter

Being nosy, she would have you believe, is the key to Michelle Carter’s longevity as a professional journalist and writer.

As a nosy kid, she learned early that people would take her seriously, answer her questions if she was a reporter so she found newspapers (middle school, high school and college) to provide her cover. By the time she collected her journalism degree at the University of Missouri J-School, she’d found that institutionalized nosiness (newspapers) would be her calling.

The Kansas City Star would be the first newspaper to pay for her journalism skills, hiring her as its first female copyeditor back in the linotype and lead type days. They installed a modesty panel in front of her desk so the guys couldn’t peek up her skirt, but they also offered her the chance to lay out the Sunday edition of a 400,000-circulation metro daily (since none of the guys wanted to work the slot on a Saturday night). She was in heaven!

Only marriage (and the chance to move back to California) lured her away from The Star to a Bay Area daily, the San Mateo Times, after a brief stop at Hearst’s Examiner in San Francisco. She had the unique luck to get hired two weeks before the four dailies in town merged into two. She was last hired and first fired, per the Newspaper Guild guidelines. Bill German, the Examiner’s legendary editor, gave her the news and handed her a road map (with the route to San Mateo marked) and the keys to his car.

“They’ve got an opening and they’re waiting for you,” he said.

So they were, but they were looking for a feature writer in the Women’s Department, far removed from the front-page excitement she loved at The Star.

“What are my chances of getting into the newsroom?” she asked the managing editor.

“Not a snowball’s chance in hell! I’ve already got my broad!”

Seventeen years (and two kids) later, it gave her a special pleasure to take over his job at the top of the heap in the newsroom. Michelle became one of only a handful of women in executive news positions in the country at the time. During her tenure at The Times, the American Society of News Editors named the paper as one of the best small newspapers in America.

While she was redecorating the corner office, along came an invitation to join a delegation to the Soviet Union. Armed with six years of classroom Russian, she launched the second phase of her professional career posing those nosy questions all across the 11 time zones of this massive country.

Questions asked in Minsk about the radioactive fallout from the explosion and meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor led to the publication of her first book, Children of Chernobyl: Raising Hope From the Ashes (Augsburg, 1993), and the founding of the Children of Chernobyl Project of Northern California, which delivered half a million dollars worth of drugs and medical supplies to a hospital caring for Chernobyl’s youngest victims.

Then came the phone call from the United States Information Agency inviting Michelle to serve as the U.S. Journalist-in-Residence in the post-Soviet, pre-Putin bubble of freedom in Russia. She would leave The Times to midwife the birth of an independent press with newspapers throughout the country and to write a Russian-language manual on newspaper design that’s still in distribution in Russia today.

That year, living in a flat on the banks of the Moscow River, provided the narrative for her memoir, From Under the Russian Snow (Bedazzled Ink). It tells the story of her (often humorous) shoulder-to-shoulder participation in life in Russia and the blow she suffered when her husband died in a river accident in California while she was away.

She returned to her empty house at the end of her grant to find that she had no job since The Times had been sold. Cue Act 3 of her professional life. The small Catholic school near her home, Notre Dame de Namur University, needed an advisor for its student newspaper. That job teaching professional nosiness to eager young journalists led to 15 years as an instructor of newswriting, feature writing, business writing, marketing and newspaper design.

Along the way, she married a dear friend, became a grandmother and started editing airplane magazines in her pajamas and bunny slippers in front of her desktop Mac every morning.

See how far a little nosiness can take you.