He walked in the room, wearing a long, tan coat and holding a cup of coffee from Au Bon Pain.

Taking a seat, he surveyed the room of students. Then he was introduced and he started to speak.

He was Roger Ebert, and within an hour, he inspired me to want to be a journalist.

Ebert came on Friday to the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago for a session with college media from around the state. Not only did the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign graduate have a few jokes up his sleeve, he pronounced “Citizen Kane” the best movie of all time and shared his idea that 8 a.m. classes really are just a theory for most students.

The former editor in chief of the Daily Illini, Ebert is the premiere film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. He said he started working as a journalist when he was 15 and really enjoyed “Almost Famous.” He said last year, he predicted the Internet as a money-mover for students and now it sounds like people will actually have to work. He talked about the past, the future and where journalism is right now. He talked about movies.

Most of all, he was genuine.

In a time when some adults get the feeling students don’t listen to anyone, Ebert had 100 students or more hanging on his stories. You knew he was telling the truth, speaking because he wanted to and not because he felt he had to.

He said “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” was a good movie. He pronounced “Fargo” and “Pulp Fiction” as two of the best movies in the last 10 years and he said zero stars is a rating reserved for movies that, not only are inherently bad, but morally evil as well.

As students roared at his dry humor and fell silent to hear his answers, I thought about how genuine character seems to be out of popularity these days. So much of our time is spent trying to get homework done, get out of work on time and get a job, that we hardly have time to reflect on things. Rather than talking about a movie we’ve just seen, we instead look ahead to things we want/need/have to do.

Ebert talked about movies and media as if he had pondered them for days, turned them over and shown them to the light of day. His answers were the concise, well-thought out answers that professors wish we had and the spirit of conversation we wish most professors had.

Most of all, they were genuine.

Sometimes journalists are seen as those people who just want to have a piece of the action, who want to write down anything at all, who aren’t considerate of facts. When confronted with these accusations, it’s hard to know how to prove that it isn’t true. All I have to go on is my genuine response. However, that sometimes doesn’t seem to be good enough.

So I will go with this. I think journalists go for the genuine truth. And I think that’s what people want to read. The idea that folks want to read a lie or an opinion disguised as the truth is ludicrous. The point is to tell the story, not tell one person’s version of the story or their opinion on the story.

That’s why the editorial pages are available, for both the paper and its readers to speak their views. That is the person’s own genuine view.

It’s not just for newspapers, either. It’s for all people and how they conduct themselves.

Ebert didn’t have to come to the Illinois College Press Association convention Friday. He didn’t have to speak to a bunch of students, nor answer a million questions from movies to majors.

But he did. And I think he enjoyed it, too.

He walked in the room wearing a long, tan coat and carrying a cup of coffee. He’s a journalist who started out at a university and now is at the Sun-Times. He’s Roger Ebert and he is still a down-to-earth, genuine person.

It just goes to show that genuine character can exist no matter how big people make it.