Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 28, 1993 TAG: 9303290402
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELIZABETH STROTHER EDITORIAL WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
I've been writing unsigned editorials for the past few weeks, and now it's time to introduce myself to you all in this signed column. This is much the harder task, for I'm a shy person and - the worse luck for you - not particularly extraordinary.
I'm a University of Missouri graduate, Class of '73, which may mean nothing to most of you but carries a certain weight in my profession because its School of Journalism enjoys a fine reputation. I got small scholarships and part-time jobs - full-time in summers - and worked my way through. Higher education is cheap in Missouri - at least it was at that time.
My first job was on a small daily outside metropolitan St. Louis, where I worked 50 or 60 hours for $125 a week for the privilege of doing what I loved to do. I covered the School Board, which was a lively beat - we had not one but two teachers unions, and they didn't get along well with the school administration - and also did desk work.
On a tiny daily, you have to understand, this meant covering often-contentious School Board meetings till well into the night, writing up two or three stories, going to bed at 1 or 2 in the morning and getting up at 5:30 to be in the office by 7 so I could lay out pages and edit other reporters' copy.
I got relief from my morning desk duties if there was breaking news on my beat and I had to work the story.
I joked to my old high-school buddies, none of whom had gone to college and most of whom had cushier jobs, that the hours were awful, but at least the pay was lousy.
I loved it.
I got experience in every part of news - reporting, deadline writing, photography (oh, yeah, with only one photog on the staff, we reporters took many of our own pictures, too), editing, headline writing and page layout.
Then the newspaper folded.
We had a lot of news in it but not many ads, and such a newspaper does not stay in business.
It was a real classy operation - the owners flew in from out of state and ripped protesting staffers away from our desks a half-hour before deadline for a meeting. We had a new lead story for the front page: The newspaper was closing and this was the final edition. Only a few people who were needed to operate the press for outside printing jobs need bother to come in tomorrow.
We were reeling, but not to worry. Many of us got immediate offers for temporary jobs at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which had decided to fill the void left by our newspaper's closing with a five-day-a-week section for the fast-growing county we had served. It hired me as an editor, and I began the briefest and most unhappy stop in my career.
I had always loved reading the Post. It was revered in my home when I was growing up.
Oh, my dad occasionally bought a competing Globe-Democrat, which had bolder headlines, bigger photographs and a more populist appeal. I always regarded it as a shabby thing.
My folks took world events seriously. They were serious newspaper readers, and the Post was a serious newspaper. It was delivered to us daily.
Working at the Post, however, was the pits. Our section went to press right after the bulldog, the newspaper's earliest edition. It was an afternoon paper at the time, and the first editions went to press early in the morning. That meant I worked from 2 to 9 a.m.
My most vivid memory is of arriving on the parking lot in a blighted part of downtown St. Louis in the middle of the night, pounding on the door of the sleeping attendant's shack so I could pay my parking fee, and stepping over the men lying asleep on the ground. Drunk, I assumed. Out completely, I hoped.
Then I'd walk across the street to the front of the building - which was kept locked at night. Security reasons. Didn't want any ne'er-do-wells getting in. So I scurried down a dark alley around to the back door.
I found the atmosphere inside the building just as depressing, and I couldn't adjust to the overnight schedule. I never did get a full night's sleep. The pay seemed fabulous at the time, but I hadn't gone into journalism for the money. I was miserable and, after just a few months, I knew I had to leave.
That's when I came to Roanoke.
I'm new to editorial writing, but not to Roanoke or the Roanoke Times & World-News. I've been an editor, of some sort, here for 15 years, and you've seen my work many times before. You just didn't know it.
I took a job as a copy editor - which is fun work, if you like that sort of thing. But no one does it for fame - or fortune, for that matter.
It's anonymous work and seldom draws notice unless done poorly. Editing stories is part of it, but copy editors also make decisions on what stories and photos will appear in the paper, design the pages to display them, and write the headlines and cutlines that go with them.
Part of the pleasure is in the teamwork, but there is a lot of individual pride involved as well.
I admit feeling some chagrin about my little brother's reaction when once, brand new to the business, I showed him some of the news pages I had produced. There was one cutline I thought I had written particularly well. It was readable, concise and, I thought, the kind of enticing cutline that would make readers want to jump right into the story that accompanied the photo.
He burst into laughter. Gales of it. I thought he had noticed some embarrassing error that I had overlooked. But after several moments he was able to gasp out: "I just never thought about anyone writing these little things. You know, for a living."
Needless to say, since then I've confined any crowing about triumphs - an attractive page layout, a clever headline, a sharp editing job - to colleagues on the copy desk. Not everybody understands.
I did that for five years, then worked as an assistant city editor for five, then became news editor, supervising the work of the copy desk in putting out the morning newspaper.
Now here I am writing for the editorial page, still a bit astounded and amused that these folks pay me to do something that is so much fun - and under working conditions that are considerably better than I could have imagined 15 years ago.
This newspaper now is revered in my home, and it really is a classy operation.
Glad to be here. Very, very glad.
by CNB