Episode 34: Pocket Change Podcast
Is journalism still important today? In this episode of Pocket Change, Shea and Carrie chat with Ted Kluck, Associate Professor of Communication Arts at Union University. Kluck shares his experience about leading the journalism program for Union, and he gives insight into the impact of storytelling and the arts.
“We're chasing magic,” says Kluck. “It's more art than science, what we do. So really with writing, the best a writing teacher can offer is to give you examples of the best, let you sit with the best, and then practice and get lots of reps in, and that's what we do at Union.”
Summary
Having years of experience in professional writing, Kluck has written for ESPN the magazine, USA Today, and other publications. He also has 30 published books. Along with writing, Kluck is passionate about podcasting. He has been a host and co-host on numerous podcasts, such as The Happy Rant and the Gut Check Podcast. His current project is called Kluck.
As the political climate has changed in the United States, journalism has changed as well. Today, news is more and more connected with entertainment, so journalists are faced with the task of presenting information in unique ways. While these changes have made a significant impact on the journalism industry, there are still many opportunities for those who want to pursue a writing career.
“One thing that hasn't changed about journalism is that there's no fewer stories being disseminated,” says Kluck. “They're just coming out in different ways. So, while it may have been print in the past, it's more online now, but point being, if you can tell a story well, especially in a long story, the long interview, the voicey opinion piece. If you can do this at a really high level, there's no shortage of work for people who have those talents and those skillsets.”
Through a partnership with Leaders, students in Union's journalism program can attend the Southeast Journalism Conference and have print magazines. This financial help allows Union students to be competitive with other universities, which further promotes the program to encourage higher writing performance.
Key Takeaways
- While journalism has changed, it doesn’t mean there are less stories to tell.
- Today, jobs in journalism look different than they did years ago with most journalism pieces being online instead of print and framed more as entertainment.
- Leaders Credit Union’s partnership with the journalism program helps funding, so students can attend the Southeast Journalism Conference and have print magazines.
Wanting to be a storyteller? Discover if journalism is the right career for you by learning more about Union University’s Communication Arts Department.
If you’re interested in learning more about Leaders Credit Union, visit our membership page or explore our savings accounts.
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Full Transcript
Shea:
Hey, this is Shea.
Carrie:
And this is Carrie.
Shea:
Welcome to the Pocket Change podcast.
Carrie:
Where you'll learn better ways to spend, save and invest, and take control of your financial journey.
Shea:
So, Carrie, the way we consume media has changed over the years, and with AI it's probably going to change even more, and now there's even more and more content being produced.
Carrie:
That's right, and it makes the art of telling a good story even more complicated and complex. So today, we actually have an expert in storytelling and journalism, and I cannot wait to talk to him.
Shea:
It's going to be a great conversation.
Carrie:
Ah Kluck, let's get started. We're excited to welcome our guest today, Ted Kluck, Journalism Professor at Union University. Welcome to Pocket Change.
Ted Kluck:
Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Carrie:
So can you tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming a college professor?
Ted Kluck:
Yeah, so I teach journalism at Union. I've been there for nine years. Absolutely love it. Love being there. Love working with the students. I think when I was in college, zero percent of people would have bet on me to be a future college teacher. I was an athlete. I went to college to play football, had some injuries, broke the same leg twice, had a bit of an existential crisis kind of like what's the point of me? Why am I here? What am I doing? Met a girl. So all great stories. She was a senior. I was a sophomore. She was an English theater type girl. Loved to read, loved books. I had always loved to write, but it was something that I kept a secret because in the '90s, you weren't an athlete and a writer. You were one or the other persona-wise. I always kept that part of my reading and writing life secret, but she encouraged me to lean into it and go for it. Got an opportunity early in my career to write for ESPN the magazine in the early 2000s, and that opened all kinds of doors and led to books. So in 2005, 2006-ish, I did a book on Mike Tyson called "Facing Tyson", and then did some pro football stuff, some college football stuff, and did books for like fifteen years until I came here.
Ted Kluck:
It's been a wild ride. We were freelance for most of that time, so way up and down financially, eat what you kill, but I loved it. It was a grand life. The Lord's been very kind, and it's neat to be able to tell stories for a living. I like that.
Shea:
So you've had a career path that's gone a variety of different ways, and that's also led into some podcasting. So tell us how you got involved in some podcasts.
Ted Kluck:
Yeah, so I've pretty much never been early to technologies, and I've never been a guy who gets super excited about tech, but there was this moment ten-ish years ago when I decided to get off all forms of social media just because I'm not good there. I knew myself, I knew my sin issues, my persona issues, and just thought, it'd be better for me to be off social, which really frustrated my book publishers and my agent because they wanted me to be promoting all the time. I didn't like that. I didn't like the cloying, needy, self-promotional thing on social media, but right around this time, I was invited to be on a podcast called The Happy Rant. I didn't know much about podcasting, but I knew that it was like radio, and I knew that I loved radio growing up. I love listening to radio, and so I said yes, and that podcast got pretty big. We did it for about a decade and had 100,000 or so downloads a month and did live shows.
Shea:
That's what we're getting to with the Pocket Change podcast.
Ted Kluck:
We're right there.
Carrie:
You're going to bring us there.
Ted Kluck:
You guys, it's going to be decadence and excess after this drops.
Ted Kluck:
That's right.
Ted Kluck:
Your life is about to change. No, it was fun. It was a lot of laughs and good times and good conversations. It engaged those parts of journalism and storytelling that I really like connecting with people and hearing their stories and making people laugh and just doing some of those natural things. So quit the Happy Rant six months or so ago, but I have two other ones. I have one called Kluck. It's just my last name. I always loved Johnny Carson. So a guy offered to produce a show for me, and he just said, "All you have to do is show up and answer questions, and we can call it Kluck." I was like, "Yeah, I'm in. I'm in on that." So we're doing that one, and I have one that's tied to a publishing company I started about fifteen years ago called The Gut Check Podcast, and our company is Gut Check Press. So just a little small publisher. We do some niche...
Carrie:
Do all kinds of things.
Ted Kluck:
Yeah, I stay pretty busy.
Carrie:
It sounds like it.
Carrie:
So how do you think that journalism has changed over the past ten to fifteen years?
Ted Kluck:
That's an interesting question, and it's one that I get asked a lot by parents and prospective students. It has changed. I think as our world has become more bifurcated politically, journalism has gone that way, too, in terms of how we cover news. I think the biggest way, though, is that journalism is really tied to entertainment now. As you're getting your news, you're also being entertained. You're having whatever philosophical proclivities you have, you're having those ears tickled by wherever you're getting your news. So, there's no fewer jobs. They're just different jobs, and so for my students, when we talk about what jobs to get or where they want to work, part of the calculus is you're always doing somebody's bidding, and you have to make your piece with whoever's bidding you're doing, right? That's different than what the world looked like in the year 2000 or 2001 when I started writing for ESPN, when they were just in the sports business and not the worldview business. So they may not want me now, and I may not want them, but one thing that hasn't changed about journalism is that there's no fewer stories being disseminated.
Ted Kluck:
They're just coming out in different ways. So while it may have been print in the past, it's more online now, but point being, if you can tell a story well, especially in a long story, the long interview, the voicey opinion piece. If you can do this at a really high level, there's no shortage of work for people who have those talents and those skillsets. So that's what we're trying to develop in them at Union.
Shea:
And so storytelling is a big part of what you do and what you've done, and so why is that so important?
Ted Kluck:
So when I was a little kid, I was shy. I was painfully shy. My face would get red if I thought anybody was looking at me, and if I was in a room with people, I'd get real nervous and quiet, but I had this older cousin. He was four years older than me. He was super cool. I thought everything he did was amazing. And I had a grandpa who was really charismatic, and we get together for these family gatherings. These guys were from Chicago, and they were just interesting people, and colorful people. They would tell stories, and they would tell these amazing funny stories, and everybody be laughing, and they always had a point. I just thought, "Man, if I could be like that one day. If I could tell stories, command a room." So for a shy kid, that was aspirational for me, but then somewhere along the line, I just fell in love with books. I'd always loved magazines, so I grew up reading magazines, and I love the tactile nature of them. I love that they lived in people's cars and backpacks and on airplanes, they went with people, and books go with people everywhere.
Ted Kluck:
I love the idea, I think first with football, but now with writing. I think I had a strong desire to prove that I existed. You know what I mean? That I was on the planet. I thought that football would deliver that, but it didn't. It turned out that writing did, and I hope that people have a relationship with my books similar to some of the authors that I loved relating to their books, having them in my life, in my house.
Carrie:
That's wonderful. We at Leaders do think it's important to partner with our community. So we're proud to have a partnership with the Union Journalism Program. How do you think that this partnership has contributed to enhance the student experience?
Ted Kluck:
Well, I believe in competition, right? And I love competition. I think that dates back to when I was an athlete, and it just becomes part and parcel with your life, and you always know where you are, and so when I took this job, the journalism program was pretty small. It was struggling. I think there were only a couple of kids in the major, but aspirational for me was to get it to a point where the top of our roster could compete with the top of anybody's roster in the nation. So like Northwestern, Syracuse, some of these journalism schools that you hear about. The Lord has been kind. We've been able to grow the program. The classes are getting larger. We have way more kids in the major now. I think the competition has elevated all the ships. The tide of competition has risen, but with the economy being the way it is, it's really important to me that we get to keep putting out an excellent hardcover, hardcopy magazine. Printing costs go up. Union budgets haven't necessarily raised to meet the cost of printing, and I was actually in the pool this summer with one of your colleagues, and I launched this idea.
Ted Kluck:
That's where all deals are made. That's where all the deals are made. That's where all the big executives do business. But no, I launched the idea by him, and I was like, this would keep us really competitive. It would allow us to travel. It would allow us to go to this competition that we go to every year, the Southeast Journalism Conference, where we win awards that a school our size has no business winning. We've won Best Magazine of the South a few times. We've won Best Feature Writer of the South twice. We got Best Arts and Entertainment Writer this year for the first time ever. The money that we get from Leaders and the support that we get from Leaders really allows us to stay competitive, and one of the things that I love about that is that I never want what we do as a Christian college to be junior varsity. I think in Christian media for a while, there was a sense of, "We'll just do what the world does, but we'll do it worse." I always was at odds with that. I never liked that mentality. This allows us to do things at really high level, to recruit great kids, to retain.
Ted Kluck:
It keeps me fresh because it encourages me that I have the resources to do what we need to do in the program. So I'm super, super grateful for it.
Carrie:
I'm happy to hear that.
Ted Kluck:
Yeah, for sure.
Shea:
We believe in that, too, to remain competitive. We've got a sign in our office that says, "Don't Stop Until You're Proud." So we want to be putting out the best for our members each day and look out for their needs. So we agree. It's important, and why also is journalism and the arts and programs like that, why are those still so important in education.
Ted Kluck:
It's an interesting moment for higher-ed, right? Because a pragmatic view of the world could say, "why go to college anymore? You can just get out and begin working and earned a competitive wage." There's actually a lot of logic in that. It's hard to hate that mentality, but on the other hand, I think learning to learn is really important. For me, my life was emblematic of it in the sense that I went to college for one thing. I went to college to be an athlete. The Lord had other plans. He disabused me of that idol pretty quickly, but then there were people in that environment that could ignite my passions in other areas. I had a professor. I'll never forget him, was so kind to his wife. He spoke so well of his wife and so highly of the Lord. I don't remember much of what we talked about in the class, but I remember his encouragement. He was one who came to visit me in the hospital after I was injured, and he leaned over the rail of the hospital bed and he goes, "Have you ever considered being a writer?"
Ted Kluck:
And I never had, but that opened up my whole world and if I hadn't been there to have that happen, and to then get things to read to ignite the imagination and push me in a different direction. I'm sure it would have been fine, but I think there's a lot of value in it, and there's a lot of value in the discipleship that happens in that model. I mean, that's at the heart of what we do at Union. If I can be in a relationship relationship with people and make much of the Lord, make much of my craft, then I'm doing something, and we can all feel pretty good about it.
Shea:
Yeah, it's definitely impactful for sure, especially for the students.
Ted Kluck:
I hope so.
Shea:
And a by-product for you, too.
Ted Kluck:
Yeah, I want it to be. It's vibrant for me. It keeps me young. I still love the craft. I still get a kick out of it. I still love a great story. We're chasing magic. It's more art than science, what we do. So really with writing, the best a writing teacher can offer is to give you examples of the best, let you sit with the best, and then practice and get lots of reps in, and that's what we do at Union.
Shea:
So since this is a financial education podcast talking about money, what's some of your financial advice that you can give us?
Ted Kluck:
I don't know that I have great money advice, and I don't know that anybody would say, "Kluck is amazing with money." I'll tell you a story. This was sophomore year of college.
Shea:
This is a storytelling episode.
Ted Kluck:
It's a storytelling episode. So for better or worse, we're going to do it. I just met my wife, and I was crazy about her. We've been on one date. Again, she's a senior. She's about to graduate. I'm just a little sophomore trying to find my way in the world. I was at this rich private school, but I was just a football player from the country. I was from the cornfield. I didn't have two pennies to rub together, but I was like, "Man, I really like this girl, and I really don't want her to leave." Our second date, I drove her to Indianapolis for dinner. I wanted to take her to a really nice dinner. In the car on the way, I had this speech planned where I was going to tell her, "I may never have money in in my life, and if that's a problem with you, you can get out now." I had this whole thing planned where I was going to just give her the gracious out, and God bless her, she was so offended. She was like, "Who do you think I am? She's like, I'm in this for you."
Ted Kluck:
And she was like, "I'm betting on you. I'm betting on your upside." She bet on my upside.
Carrie:
That's all we need is someone to just believe in us, right?
Ted Kluck:
We do. And it was so beautiful, and it worked out. So I think my piece of financial advice, especially to people in college, would be, don't use it as the only metric in life. If it's functionally the only measuring stick you have, then your life could be quite empty. Don't evaluate people based on it. Don't run people through that finances only rubric, and gosh, I'm glad my wife didn't, because I'd still be single and very sad, but she bet on me, and I'm so glad we've been together twenty-seven years.
Carrie:
That's wonderful. I completely agree with you, too.
Shea:
Yeah, I'm sure a lot of us could say that as broke college students going on dates and things like that.
Ted Kluck:
That's right, man. Yeah, you're trying to do your best. I borrowed my parents car, detailed it, had the Q-tips out. I really wanted to impress her.
Carrie:
Well, it sounds like it worked.
Ted Kluck:
I think so. We did something right.
Carrie:
So speaking of money, I have one last question for you.
Ted Kluck:
Sure.
Carrie:
If you were to find some extra change in your pocket, what would you spend it on?
Ted Kluck:
What a great question. So I love water. I love large bodies of water, okay? I've realized in all my years of vacationing, what I most want to do on a vacation is just contemplative gazing. I just want to sit and look at a beautiful body of water and eat great food. So I need the great food, the contemplative gazing. Chicago is one of my favorite American cities. It's probably my favorite American city. Chicago real estate is actually quite cheap right now, and so I've been taking the Chicago lakefront condo journey. The tabs are open on my computer, and we're kicking the tires on it. If I book one more ghost writing project or one more big off the field at Union project, we could maybe pull the trigger on that.
Carrie:
So a little more than some pocket change.
Ted Kluck:
A little more than pocket change.
Shea:
Add your pocket change to that.
Ted Kluck:
Exactly. We can add the pocket change up and then hopefully...
Ted Kluck:
Save the pocket change till you have that much.
Ted Kluck:
I'm betting on Chicago right now. Chicago is at a low ebb, but think it's going to come roaring back. I think people are always going to want lakefront, so it could be a good investment.
Carrie:
Sounds like a great It was a good end to me.
Shea:
Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast today. We appreciate you being here.
Ted Kluck:
Man, thanks for having me, you guys. It was a lot of fun.
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