After winning awards from the Maryland-Delaware Press Association, he joined the "Capitol Times" newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1971, while working at the "Cap Times" and as a stringer for "The New York Times", he was awarded a coveted study grant from the Alicia Patterson Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation fellow. Reporting from Mexico City, Amsterdam, Ibiza, Athens, and London, his articles for the two foundations about "contemporary Western youth movements" were published in an array of national newspapers and magazines. During this time, while covering countercultural movements in the West, he reported as well on the massacre of student dissidents in Tlatelolco, Mexico City and on the violent repression of their Greek counterparts by the Greek military junta in Athens. Both assignments were considered dangerous.