I’ve wanted to be a journalist ever since the newspaper unit in Mrs. Dodson’s sixth-grade reading class. I was assigned to write a news-style version of a scene from Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild.” I wrote it up on my typewriter and I was hooked.

Many years later, I’m a government and politics reporter for The Baltimore Banner, a new nonprofit, online news organization.

I previously worked at The Baltimore Sun, The Capital and Maryland Gazette newspapers in Annapolis, The Daily Times in Salisbury, Gannett News Service in the Washington area and The Diamondback student newspaper at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Each day I try to live up to this statement from my journalism hero, the late Katharine Graham:

“Newspapers give people the information they need to make our democracy work.”

(photo by Ulysses MuÑoz.)