Samantha Lees: Young journalists need to listen to Bob Lutz

Bob Lutz should talk to any young journalist looking for someone to give them advice.
From a strong personality to hard hitting pieces of advice, Lutz knows how to capture a
classroom.
Lutz’s whole life revolved around sports. He loves baseball and basketball along with football
and golf. When Lutz was a young child, he would bring tape recorders to different sports to
commentate.
“When you take a tape recorder to a game at 10-years-old, it’s clear you want to be a
communicator,” Lutz said.
Lutz has been good at communicating since before he can remember. When he realized
professional sports wasn’t his calling, he turned to journalism.
Before graduating in 1973, Lutz took journalism classes at Derby High School, and participated
in the Derby Daily Reporter Newspaper.
“I tend to play off people better than just standing and talking,” Lutz said.
He gave advice to Joanna Chadwick’s 21st Century Journalism class that the students really
responded to. He reminded them that they needed to try new things and not back down
because the worst that could happen, is finding another way to show your style.
After working at the Wichita Eagle for 43 years, Lutz retired. He is now in a segment on the
Radio called the Drive.
Lutz works with his only son Jeff on KFH radio.
“It’s kind of fun to hear them talk back and forth,” Chadwick said.
Bob Lutz is known for being a columnist, but he hasn’t always wrote with opinion. His first
column was an opinion on the 1996 girls Olympic Gymnastics team.
Lutz says he took a lot of heat for the columns he wrote, but he persevered and stuck with it.
The advice he gave the class was a very important aspect of journalism that every young
journalist should know.
“I didn’t write it to get noticed, I wrote it because I believed it was true,” Lutz said.