Opinion : A day that bring both sad good-byes and exciting new changes

“A good player plays where the puck is. A great player plays were the puck is going to be.” I am not a hockey fan, but I understand completely what “The Great One,” Wayne Gretzky meant, when he made that statement. I started in my career journalism full time on Sept. 21, 1992, a week before my 27th birthday. I figured then that newspapers as we knew them would last 10 years or so. I came to Vinton March 1, 2003, 11 years minus one day since I wrote my very first newspaper story. I figured I’d be working for a newspaper here for two years. I actually ended up working for newspapers in Vinton for exactly seven years. Up until now, the puck, when it comes to local news, has been in local newspapers that you hold in your hand. But for years, I have been telling my colleagues, or trying to tell them, that we need to stop focusing on newspapers and start focusing on information. The puck is heading here, to online-only media sites. That’s what Vinton Today is all about – being ready for those changes in how Vinton residents look at the news. Every day, someone else in our community finds a new reason to look for local news and connections via the Internet, instead of at their doorstep or in their mailbox. Now that there will no longer be a daily newspaper serving our area, the only daily resource that Vinton residents will have for local news and connections are Internet sites such as Vinton Today. Sad Good-Byes March 24, the day I learned about the changes to the newspapers where I had worked so hard and fought so often for so long to make sure they remained truly local news sources, was already a sad day for me. Before coming to work at my Vinton Today office, I buried my dog, Wellington. I had rescued him from the Vinton Animal Shelter six years ago, when there was an outbreak of parvo. Kim Dix and the other volunteers had been scrambling to find homes for the dogs to keep the safe from this deadly disease. I brought Wellington home, and soon he adopted me. Not long after he first came home with me, I took him to a Shelter event at Theisen’s. I sat down along a wall and soon Wellington walked over to me and put his paw on my leg. Since then, he’s been “my” dog. Wellington and I walked to the river countless times. We wandered through the woods. I watched and taught him as Wellington figured out how to deal with cats and kittens and barbed wire fences and even other dogs that ended up at our place. Even though Wellington was friendly to all and would never bite anyone, he was known to stand between our family members and strange dogs, barking to scare them away. He even – although I only heard and never saw this for sure – kept a pack of wolves at bay on more than one occasion. A year ago, we put Wellington’s photo in the newspaper on April Fool’s Day. He looked healthy and mean, although he was the most gentle big dog I have ever seen. But over the winter he quickly showed signs of aging and illness. The past few days he couldn’t swallow, walk or breathe. It was time to say good-bye. A few weeks ago, we saw an ad in the paper for free puppies. We thought it would be good for both Wellington and the puppy to have a dog from the opposite age spectrum. Wellington could show the puppy where to sleep and eat. The puppy, we hoped, would energize Wellington. It worked for the puppy. She learned a few things from the old dog. But Wellington was just too old – even too old to smile for us like he often did. Letting go of one dog and embracing another sort of feels the same way as the changes I experienced in the newspaper life this month.
I came into my first newspaper job 18 years ago knowing nothing, except how to write (a little). I had never done much photography or page design. I used to think – and still do – that a newspaper job is the best first job any young person can have. You can learn such a variety of skills working for a newspaper. My first computer was a Mac Classic with a 9-inch screen. We used to put the pages together literally one piece at a time. Each story was printed out and cut into three or four columns, and then cut to fit. Then we put the headlines, photographs (made in the dark room) on the page. We put borders around the photographs with very thin tape with a black strip in the middle. One page would have up to 40 or 50 different pieces of paper glued to it. My first big success technologically was to learn how to print one story, already divided with headlines, on one piece of paper. We worked that way for a few years until we upgraded and learned how to do the entire page, including photographs, on the computer. Then we figured out how to print them electronically so we did not have to paste them on paper at all. I learned so much more than writing and layout. I learned photography skills. I found out about angles and lighting and timing. And I did this all by experience – by seeing what worked and what did not. Then we learned computer skills, and how to outsmart a computer that seemed unwilling to do what I needed it to do. And along the way, I learned how to deal with people, how to listen, how to interview and how to try to fix things when I screwed something up – which I seemed to do alarmingly often, at time. And yet while I loved this work, I felt that I was only there to manage the slow demise of the newspaper industry. The death of a daily newspaper, even though I have not worked there for a year and a half, brings its own kind of sadness. But the arrival of Vinton Today, like Katie our puppy, brings to me the hope and energy and responsibilities of a new life, a new era.
I have lots of new things to learn and do, new challenges I have never really had before. Just the other day, I became a journalism teacher. Sure, the class was small and informal. But in less than an hour, I shared with a handful of VS Middle Schol students the history and purpose of journalism. Together we wrote a silly story about a man who bit a dog, including all of the main characteristics of a news story (read more about that on our Junior Journalism tab). And by the end of that hour, there were four students with assignments for stories about teachers and projects at their school. It will be exciting to see what becomes of the Junior Journalists program. Maybe it will last until the end of the year; maybe, as I hope, it will become a long-term project that involves students in this new era of journalism, and teaches them at a young age how to capture the stories of our community with words and with photographs. But to gain this opportunity, I had to leave behind the career I knew and loved for 18 years. It was a difficult choice, but a necessary one. We can’t keep playing where the puck has been. We’ve got to position ourselves where it’s going to be in the near future. And I see that puck very quickly heading here, to places like Vinton Today, where without the limits or challenges that come with preparing printing, selling and delivering an actual paper, we can be here for you any time, every day, when you want to be connected to your community. So today, on this day of sadness, I will write a few more stories and make a few more plans for Vinton Today. Then I will go home and go for a walk with the new puppy, remembering with sad fondness my old dog and days of yesterday. And we will come back to the house, ready for another day in this new life that changes in technology and journalism keep bringing.