Anthony Hatcher remembers when a newspaper arrived daily to his home during his elementary school days.

“We also got Newsweek and Time. I was always reading and I was better at writing than I was at math and science,” Hatcher said. However, his dad was a pharmacist and wanted his son to follow in his footsteps.

Hatcher knew his skills didn’t lean that way. He always got top grades in English and wrote for his high school paper. But when Hatcher entered college, he tried pre-pharmaceutical classes for the first year. They didn’t pan out.

His career path was also influenced by the biggest political scandal of his time.

“When I was in junior high, I was of the Watergate generation and, nerd that I was, by ninth grade, I knew the entire president’s cabinet by name,” Hatcher said with a chuckle. “I enjoyed knowing things first and watched all the news networks.”

Though, it wasn’t just Nixon’s Watergate scandal that influenced Hatcher’s decision to become a journalist. TV Guide also played a role. In addition to informing viewers about TV show times, the magazine also had substantive articles, Hatcher said.

He devoured commentary that debated whether the press was fair to the president, articles that discussed the Pentagon Papers and the latest Washington Post pieces.    

“Subconsciously, and this just sounds conceited to even say, I think I was absorbing what was good writing and what was bad writing,” Hatcher said. “I still love paper magazines because there’s a short article and a feature piece, it’s like opening an Easter basket.”

This unintentional training proved preparatory for his college career.

The only journalism school in North Carolina at the time was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Unfortunately, Hatcher didn’t get in. He ended up going to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. While Hatcher majored in English, the school offered two journalism classes.

“I took those [classes] under really tough editors from the local newspapers. They were hard on us and that was great for me. They taught me how to write like a journalist,” Hatcher said.

When Hatcher graduated, jobs were in short supply.

“We were coming out of the Carter years and there was inflation, there was a recession, and people just weren’t hiring,” Hatcher said.

Despite this tough break, Hatcher applied for work at 10 to 15 newspapers and a few TV stations. Given it was the pre-Internet days, he went door to door to each outlet with his resume in hand. Knowing he had to put his best foot forward, Hatcher always dressed up in a coat and tie.

“I got a call one day from the Winston-Salem Journal and an editor said, ‘Were you applying for the writer-clerk position that we have here?’ I had no idea what he was talking about and I said, ‘Yes!’”Hatcher remembered.

His first job in the news world taught him judicious editing and Hatcher even got to write a feature article occasionally. From there, he worked at two daily newspapers in the state; Thomasville Times and the Daily News in Jacksonville.

Creating the Elon News Network

Today, Hatcher is a tenured journalism professor at Elon University in Elon, North Carolina. Not only does he teach classes, but Hatcher said he also played a key part in helping to evolve the university’s student-run news organization, the Elon News Network.

The network has three components: a news website, a weekly evening broadcast news show, Elon Local News, and a weekly newspaper, The Pendulum.  

“The Pendulum newspaper itself has been around for maybe half a century and those news organizations existed, but they were sort of primitive. They didn’t shoot for the moon with awards. They were not as professionalized,” Hatcher said.

Hatcher credits himself and Richard Landesberg, a fellow Elon journalism professor, and a few other colleagues with transforming Elon News Network (ENN) to “another level.”

“They [the three ENN news components] used to compete against each other and then we put them into one large network, ENN, the Elon News Network,” he said.

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Hatcher recalled a meeting with students who were strongly opposed to ENN. Hatcher and others saw the benefit of cross training students; print reporters shooting video and video students writing for the website.

“That seemed antithetical to what the students of the early 2000s wanted to do. At that time, we literally called ourselves print or broadcast [reporters],” Hatcher said.

“To this day, I remember some students who were so adamant ‘No, you can’t do that [combine TV and print]. No, they should be competitors.’ I think that one of my major roles was helping to lead that [effort] against the student rebellion and say: This is how it’s going to work.’ And help create the standard of how we would govern it,” Hatcher said.

Additionally, many of the students who produce journalism for ENN pass through Hatcher’s classes. He says this is his biggest contributions to the network.

“We teach: ‘No, you cannot misspell a name. No, you cannot fudge an error. Yes, you have to pick up the phone or you have to go talk to somebody.’ We’re always drilling, ‘You have to get it right.'" Hatcher said.