One day when I was a kid my dad brought home a roll of newsprint. I soon set about creating newspaper pages with a pencil, imagining sports gamers featuring my stuffed animals. I used other sheets to draw a map of the area lakes near our Minnesota cabin. When the newsprint ran out, I switched to making “magazines,” typing in WordPerfect.
For a fourth-grade project, I made especially nice newspaper pages about the year 1961 (we Fargo, N.D., natives are proud of Roger Maris’ 61 home runs that year), again using pencil but also pasting in photocopied pictures from encyclopedias.
Fast-forward a few decades and I’ve refined the technical side of my skills beyond pencil-and-newsprint-scraps. I’ve worked steadily as an award-winning writer, editor and designer. I’ve made additional contributions in videography, photography, web editing and social media. I write almost daily for my arts and entertainment blog.
I graduated from North Dakota State University and learned as much on the Spectrum newspaper staff as I did in the classroom. I still have a T-shirt that lists memorable quotes from each staffer. For my entry, it says “Can we have bigger papers?”
My career has coincided with the rise of digital media. At NDSU, I started the A&E Newsletter to contain the arts coverage I couldn’t fit in my print section. I was the first to try interactive polls at the Brainerd (Minn.) Dispatch, and I wrote a blog for the Sedalia (Mo.) Democrat – the only blogger other than the editor. Nowadays, I refine my personal blog’s design, and interact with readers on Facebook and Twitter.
“Backpack journalism” was an industry buzzword at the time of my Sedalia job, and I fit the definition. My editor, Bob Satnan, called me a “five-tool player” (borrowing a baseball term) because I could write, edit, design pages, shoot photos and shoot video. When I was the lone Saturday news-desk reporter, I did all of those things for the front-page feature for the next print edition, while also publishing everything to the web.
A more pressure-packed – but equally satisfying – part of that job was working the sports copy desk and manning the phone and email as game results came in from coaches. In addition to preparing my own prep roundup and reporters’ copy for print, I also quickly posted the results to the web, and sent out scores via our text service for subscribers. I did this in the few hours between shooting the first half of the big local game and editing and posting the highlight package after the print edition was sent to the press. I also wrote the TV-style script for the voiceover audio to be recorded by the sports reporter.
Other employers have given me more specific job duties. At the Panama City (Fla.) News Herald hub, I was the lead sports copy editor and page designer for the Northwest Florida Daily News of Fort Walton Beach. This job called for creative pages (such as for our college football GameDay tab) but also deadline-pressure work. I’d get a high school football gamer – cranked out by the reporter and sent minutes after the final horn – and quickly clean it up (along with the photos) and send it off.
In my job at the McClatchy Publishing Center, the goals were speed and efficiencies. My primary task on the assembly line toward producing newspapers for our 27 clients was packaging and editing Associated Press stories and photos, some for all clients, some for specific ones. I also served as a “finisher,” the last line of defense who cleans up a package (story, photos, captions, infoboxes, etc.) so it’s ready for publication.
Whether serving as a lone backpack journalist or as a cog in a team effort, I enjoy the feeling of producing quality print and web products at the end of the day. It’s sometimes creatively fulfilling, sometimes a matter of getting the job done cleanly and accurately.
One thing hasn’t changed through all my jobs: “Writer,” “editor” and “designer” are identity traits for me as much as they are professional titles.