I came late to the journalism party. Days after my 36th birthday, I reported for my first day of work at a real newspaper – Business First of Louisville.

So it’s been a decade since I first felt the adrenaline rush of breaking a news story, of beating the competition (at that time, the Courier-Journal), of seeing my name on Page One of the paper. There was a surprising thrill to painting a picture in words of a conflict that the subjects didn’t want to see in the paper.

After nearly four years, I left for what I thought were greener pastures in the dot-com world. But that’s another story for another day.

I think I’ve been trying to recapture that rush of adrenaline again ever since. It’s probably the biggest motivator for starting Page One, with my hard-working partner Jacob Payne. In the first week of real-life operation, he managed to find two significant stories that had been missed by mainstream media outlets. Once we posted our news, they had no choice but to follow our posts with their own stories.

That may be the highest praise we can expect as an independent blog, but it did serve to get my personal juices flowing. We had chased down a story with conflict at its center – we had a story that someone didn’t want in the news, and we had the goods in the form of official records. All that was left was getting quotes and comments from appropriate sources.

It got my pulse racing. It felt good to be back in the game.

The feelings came back to me Saturday night when I turned on the TV to find that my favorite film about journalism – Ron Howard’s 1994 classic “The Paper” – had just started. In the star-studded picture, New York Sun metro editor Henry Haskell (played by Michael Keaton) risks his job, his marriage, and his future chasing a story for the next day’s paper. His character is a classic newspaperman, one who puts the pursuit of the story ahead of everything else in his life. He simply couldn’t live with knowing that his paper was getting the story wrong.

Of course, journalism has changed a lot since the film was produced. Reporters aren’t working on typewriters any more. A crucial part of the film involves waiting for film to develop. There’s no Internet. But the principles of reporting haven’t changed a bit.

To protect two innocent young men arrested unfairly for a murder, Keaton must persuade a cop to tell him what he knows, on the record, so that he can get an exclusive for the front page of the next day’s paper. But his boss (Glenn Close) wants no further delays in the press schedule, and doesn’t seem to mind that the paper is set to go out with a story that’s wrong. Keaton and Close come to blows in the press room after Keaton stops the presses.

Today’s journalists still want to get the story right and take pride in their work. They have to sometimes produce copy on deadline, even if it’s only to beat the competition by a few minutes. Get the story up first online is the new way of keeping score. We count success by site visits, not newsstand sales. And the competition is as likely to be a TV station as it is a newspaper. Or an independent blogging operation. Anyone can have immediacy, but it takes discipline and journalism ethics to get the story right and resist rushing to publish.

Maybe there was some serendipity involved in the airing of “The Paper” right when I needed to see it, right when I needed a little push to get motivated to get back to chasing stories. It’s good to be back.

Rick