Wire to Wire
Bull and Watson go south of the border to forge dual AP careers
By Alan Kirkpatrick

Julie Watson and Greg Bull of The Associated Press

Click here to view photos by Greg Bull, AP photographer

It's OK to be married to your job, say Greg Bull ('91) and Julie Watson ('90), but it helps if your spouse has the same employer.

"Jules and I have been married for four years but together since we graduated from J-school at CU," said Bull, an award-winning staff photographer for The Associated Press in New York City, where Watson works as an editor on the AP international desk. Before that, the couple, both 34, worked together for the AP in Mexico.

"That means this year will be our 12th year together," Bull said. "Throughout that time, we've stayed together, but often through a long-distance relationship."

The two first encountered each other as competing CU journalism students – in California.

"We met when I went to apply for an internship in my home state of California. The editor said, 'We already have an intern from CU's J-school, and here she is,' " Bull said.

Watson, a Colorado native, had moved to Southern California to live with her sister for the summer in the little town of Santa Paula and secured the internship offered by the local newspaper, the Santa Paula Chronicle.

She said that although beaten out of a job, Bull remained opportunistic.

"Greg left a note saying he wanted to learn more about the CU J-school. He had taken journalism classes, but he hadn't applied yet. So we talked and got to be friends," Watson said.

When she returned to Boulder in the fall, she shared a home with two people. They needed another roommate.

Bull moved in, and by the end of the academic year they had started dating.

"I graduated and wanted to travel in Central America. I wanted to go backpacking, and he wanted to go surfing, so we moved to Costa Rica for a year," Watson said. But Bull had another year of college, so he went back to Boulder.

"I stayed and worked for Mesoamerica, a monthly magazine circulated throughout the U.S. that's published by the Institute for Central American Studies out of San Jose, Costa Rica. We stayed in contact, and I came back for graduation."

That summer, Bull went to work at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshop, and Watson took a reporting job for a newspaper in Las Cruces, N.M.

They had managed to get jobs in the same state – five hours apart. At the end of the summer, Bull returned to Colorado and began working his way up through the ranks as a photographer at daily newspapers in Fort Morgan, Longmont and Greeley.

"After two years apart, we finally decided the relationship was worth it and grabbed an opportunity to work together along the U.S.-Mexico border in Brownsville, Texas," he said. "The jobs seemed at first to be sort of rough compromises, as we were both coming from bigger papers."

Watson said the worst part of their dual-career relationship was the initial struggle to find two jobs in one town.

"Greg was looking for photo jobs, which are harder to come by. When we finally got to work together in Brownsville, he had to take a $2 an hour pay cut so we could do it," she said. "But I only stayed at the Brownsville Herald a month before I took a job at the newspaper in McAllen, which is just down the road. We found a place to live in a town halfway in between."

After working for two years on the Texas border, Bull and Watson decided to quit their jobs, go to Ecuador and try free-lancing.

"It was a great experience, and I would include it as advice to anybody pursuing journalism a career. It was scary, as we were steadily going the newspaper route beforehand, with steady paychecks and benefits," Bull said.

At first, Bull didn't get any work selling pictures.

"Once Julie landed work as a stringer for The Miami Herald out of Quito, we could finally stop eating just boiled potatoes in chicken stock," he said. "We lived in this horrible apartment in Quito, where so many window panes were busted out that we had most of them covered with paper menus from nearby Chinese restaurants."

Bull said his work in Ecuador allowed him to become the AP's photographer in Chiapas, Mexico. Watson later used her clips from Quito to join AP as a reporter in Mexico City. Then came one of the ultimate opportunities for a couple with a shared love of cross-cultural journalism.

"The job that really brought most of our talents together was our last job, where we opened a bureau for The Associated Press to cover the U.S.-Mexico border from the Mexican city of Monterrey," Bull said. "Working out of a house, we would fly to all parts of the border, working on longer features as well as spot news."

Watson said few couples get the chance to routinely share such intense experiences as working along the Amazon River or getting lost in the desert.

"One time we went to find a hot spot for migrants to cross the border. It was way out there in the desert. We went with a group of officers from a police force called Grupo Beta, which is a kind of migrant rescue squad set up by the Mexican government.

"But another time when we tried to go, no one from Grupo Beta showed up. So we rented a vehicle and tried to get out to it by ourselves.

"We drove around and around, and realized we didn't know where we were. Just as the sun was starting to go down, a pickup truck packed with 30 migrants came by to cross the border. They told us how to get out, and we did."

However, opening the Monterrey bureau turned out to have a substantial downside. "It was isolating. It was too hard to maintain any kind of social life," she said.

After a year and a half, they both transferred to New York. The Monterrey bureau remains open, and the AP is adding a second reporter there.

Watson said a magazine writing class at CU affirmed the need for her to do more than look for the best news job she could find upon graduation. The instructor was author and free-lance writer Pam Novotny ('79).

"The School gave me a strong foundation, and that's been important. But she told me how she went off to Turkey just for fun after she graduated from college. She told me that if I was willing to take the risks of traveling abroad, it could really help my career. She believed that you can take your interests, mix them with journalism and have a great life," Watson said.

Bull said he traces his enthusiasm for photojournalism to former instructor Paul Moloney ('56).

"I took one of his courses when I was still vying for writing internships and a writing career, and his direction in photography really hooked me – the idea that you could connect with the people in a story in such a different way than a writer, and the ability to offer up an image to readers that could communicate not just the facts, but all the stuff that's hard to put a word on, like the emotions and even just the subtle feel of a place or event. Well, I knew that was all I wanted to do for as long as anybody is willing to pay me to do it."

Actually, before any monetary compensation was offered, Bull and Watson honed their skills at the Campus Press for course credit.

"I loved my college days," Watson said. "I participated in the South African protests. I lived in the shantytown we built on campus. Later I worked at Campus Press covering protests. There were so many that they actually made a beat and called it 'protest.' "

Bull said the only way CU failed him was by allowing him to skirt foreign-language requirements.

"There was a sort of loophole where you could get out of taking language courses. So, naturally, I did. And that really made things harder for me down the road," he said.

"I'm fluent in Spanish now, but I had to work pretty hard at it, learning on the fly in difficult situations. To be honest, with the makeup and the pressures on cities in the American West, I don't know how a journalist can make it without speaking Spanish."

Throughout their marriage, Watson and Bull have realized they both possess the drive to do what it takes to succeed.

"We both understand the other's passion for the job and what that requires each of us to do. We don't get in fights over the job," Watson said.

"The best part of working together is that we both know what the other has to deal with," Bull said. "So if she's still hammering out a story lead at odd hours of the night, or I have to wake up before dawn to go hang out on strange street corners, we both understand.

"But in some cases, understanding can actually be harder. I spent more than a month in Afghanistan last year, and Julie would see the reports coming out of there before anyone, and, through her journalistic abilities, had a very vivid picture of the dangers I was facing, which I know made for some sleepless nights for her."

They enjoy the change of pace New York City has provided — things such as yoga classes, great restaurants, clubs and parties – compared to their south-of-the-border schedule that kept them away from home all but five nights a month. Yet they're living in temporary housing and thinking about subsequent career moves.

"I edit copy from all over the world. It makes you up to date on everything that's going on everywhere," Watson said. "But I don't get to write as much.

"I loved the freedom of the border job. We could end up going back to Mexico. Or we could go to another region. We know that if there's an incredible job out there, one of us has to compromise, I think we're at the point where we could do that. If that happened, one of us could free-lance."

"We wanted to try out life in one of the world's greatest cities for a while," Bull said. Also, the move gives Watson experience in AP's nerve center that can be invaluable to a correspondent's career.

"She is currently taking Arabic classes," he said, "so we shall see where we go next .…"

gregorybull@yahoo.com
jlwatson@ap.org