Charismatic Local: Reporter Frank X. Mullen

Frank Mullen sure does like to tell stories. He likes it so much; he’s managed to do it for a living for the past two decades. Mullen has been with the Reno Gazette-Journal for 20 years and is senior reporter. He has been telling stories for as long as he can remember and is what some people might consider to be a jack-of-all-trades. Prior to telling stories as a reporter, he told stories as a truck driver and as a car mechanic. Standing in a classroom surrounded by a couple dozen new Mac computers and students glued to their laptops and iPads, it’s hard not to think that Frank would have fit in a litter better at a newsroom where typewriters and telegraphs were the norm. He claims to understand Morse code and if you didn’t know any better, you might mistake him for a railroad conductor.

But make no mistake, Frank is a worthy storyteller and respectable reporter. Telling stories as a career is not something that has come easily to Frank, and he warns those interested in pursuing it as a career that it is a skill that he has honed over the years to insure that he is “great at it.”

Frank likes complicated stories, stories that require investigation and makes him ask the question, “what the hell?” Many people think that story telling in 2011 is all about technology, according to Frank, that shouldn’t be the case since you don’t have to depend on technology for the use of your brain.

Frank offers a lot of advice to us inspiring journalist-but most importantly he reminds us to find ways around the roadblocks, to know the experts and to rely on them. It is very hard as a reporter working on a deadline to obtain the knowledge of someone who has ben working in a profession his or her entire life. You simply cannot match them.

He cautions that being a journalist is about being a good reporter and also about feeding the monster-we must have persistence. Lastly, he wants all storytellers out there to know that the most important thing about the story is not the documents or what you find on the internet-the most important thing is the human aspect, “The human story beats the hell out of everything else.”

For more information about Frank check out http://frankxmullen.com/