I remember as a kid growing up in a small Louisiana town asking my parents to bring me one thing from their trip to The Big Apple: a Sunday edition of the New York Times. They did and I spread that baby out, practically rolled around on it and wrapped myself in it. I guess I was 12 or 13 years old, and I swore that one day I would make a paper.
For more than 16 years I “made papers” at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, but changes in the business of journalism have led me to look beyond a newsroom for opportunities to utilize my writing, editing, design and digital media skills.
My last gig was as a Digital Editor at The Daily Memphian, an online-only hyperlocal source of journalism. It was a great experience, being in on the ground floor of this non-profit startup. The experience allowed me to pad by toolbox a bit more and get some managerial experience under my belt.
Throughout my 25 years in the newspaper business, my duties were wide-ranging: from classified ad sales at a tiny daily to designing A1 and special sections for one of the Midsouth’s largest newspapers. My day-to-day duties at The Commercial Appeal included designing the main news and local sections, Sunday Viewpoint, features and the weekly Go Memphis entertainment supplement, usually in their entirety. I am an experienced copy editor and, as staffing diminished on our design/copy desk, worked in that capacity when the need arose. That versatility served me well; the ability to write a headline with impact to accompany the visuals resulted in cohesive and compelling pages. As the structure and flow of the newsroom changed, my duties shifted to an emphasis on optimizing copy for web presentation. In my role as a digital producer, I was also tasked with “hot seat” duties, which required me to manage The Commercial Appeal web site, be the voice of the newspaper across social media and, as the sole person in the newsroom on weekends, produce copy for print when necessary.
When the digital desk was dissolved at The CA, I was fortunate to land a job with a small but thriving newspaper in town, designing their daily and weekly products and managing the web site for The Memphis News, from which the non-profit Daily Memphian was launched in September 2018. As part of the team that built a hyper-local, online-only news source from scratch, I provided input into the development of a custom CMS, led a team of former copy editors-turned-digital producers and helped build a subscriber base that exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations. There was a great deal of on-the-job learning -- from what it takes to appease the Google gods to exploiting social media – and a lot of long days and long weeks put in in order to accomplish our mission: to provide exemplary local journalism to our community.
Alas, this came to an end in May of COVID-19, my position a casualty of newsroom restructuring. This restructuring also eliminated the position of the photo editor, who happens to be my husband. So what did two journalists who found themselves unemployed in the middle of a pandemic do? Well, we panicked and 10 days after losing our jobs we put our house on the market. It sold IN ONE DAY, which was great but also meant we had to GTFO ASAP. We packed up our stuff and deposited it in Texas and after a grand 72-day safari around the country, settled (temporarily) in Sugar Land, outside Houston, where we parked in my generous SIL’s house for nearly a year until within a week of each other, Jim and I were offered jobs — me working remotely for The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Jim shooting for The Santa Fe New Mexican. Within a few months of locating to The Land of Enchantment, the opportunity to work where I live presented itself, and I am now a copy editor for The New Mexican’s arts and culture magazine, Pasatiempo.
So, we’ll see what life has in store for us now. We’ve landed in an amazing place. I already know I prefer lack of humidity, no mosquitos and Christmas (it is a hatch chili thing) and maybe, just maybe, this will be where we settle for the duration. But if not, we know we are perfectly capable of making lemonade out of a poo sammich.
What am I besides a nerdy herder of words and a dinosaur of the newspaper design business? Well, in my spare time I enjoy practicing yoga so I may become one with the donut. I'm an Olympic-caliber petter of cats. And I am known to dress in upholstery and feathers and walk around saying things like "Grammercy!" and "Well Met!" and "Why, yes! I WILL have another cup of mead!" I am, indeed, a Rennie.
