Parisian Phoenix Publishing

I received my first official paycheck from a newspaper while still in high school. A small local sports-themed weekly wanted to expand into a community “good news” weekly and asked me to write one feature a week to make this happen.

This was in the early 1990’s and I want to say those articles earned me $17.50. My college years led me to consider a career in public relations after an amazing internship at Binney & Smith, the Lehigh Valley icon that made Crayola crayons, just after their sale to the Hallmark Corporation.

I thought I loved corporate communications and public relations— turned out I really loved Crayola crayons. (Still do!)

After a stint in public relations and alumni communications at Lafayette College, where I met my partner-in-crime and art director Gayle Hendricks, I had a lot of newspaper jobs in an era when I could see the death of print.

I learned layout with blue grid paper and rubber cement AND computer. I received my first email address in college. When I entered the newsroom, white men still held most of the seats on editorial boards and corporate boards and none of them could imagine a world where the Internet overtook print.

“No one would ever stop reading the print newspaper,” they said.

But, as someone who had built my own web pages on Geocities and started a blog on Blogger, and a few years later lost myself in databases like Lexus-Nexus, it was hard to not consider the threat.

As newspapers morphed and sometimes died, I spent most of my time in community newspapers. Those are the weeklies. I’ve worked for free weeklies, subscription weeklies and weeklies tossed in driveways with the daily paper.

But I’ve also worked for the daily. Between each of my full-time newspaper jobs, I would freelance for the local office of The Morning Call, covering the smaller towns in my county. I loved the council meetings, not so much the school boards. My editor took a chance on me then, because I could write a decent sentence, he said, as we talked over sandwiches, probably chicken salad, at the iconic Josie’s New York Deli. (And that’s how I landed as a contributor to Armchair Lehigh Valley, because editors don’t forget dependable writers.)

A good journalist loses the ability to vocalize opinions. A good journalist spends so much time learning everything we can to provide all the sides, all the information. A good journalist doesn’t offer their opinions because we don’t want people to think they can’t trust us. A good journalist offers facts.

This has also changed the way I see the world, and it doesn’t help that in the academic world I am a “critical theorist,” which means no matter what subject I look at, I want to find what people did wrong so we don’t repeat those mistakes. (It’s a little more complex than that, but you get the idea.)

With the election just around the corner, I encourage you all to remember that the current political stage, in my opinion, has focused on personalities and showmanship more than substance. The two-party system creates an us-against-them mentality and offers no incentive to cooperate.