This week's staff picks

 She’s a one-person newsroom, but Lee Enterprises kept cutting (Mallory Noe–Payne, WVTF radio) 

Utsav Srestha/Unsplash

Unlike most print journalism majors, who work their way from small-town papers to mid-size papers to (maybe) big papers, I did things backward. I got a job at a major metropolitan paper before I even graduated college. I recognized then, but genuinely appreciate now, just how privileged I was to get that foot in the door there. They paid me $10 an hour to assemble the weather page and write captions a few nights a week. After a short stint at a mid-size paper in Arkansas, I returned to the big Houston daily for a full-time position. 

Things were going so well for the industry then that we even had someone on staff whose job it was — whenever we yelled “Copy!” — to carry our marked-up proofs across the newsroom to a vacuum shoot (like at a bank drive-thru) to deliver them to the composing room.  When the news assistants, who in earlier days were (shamefully) called copy boys, weren’t doing that, they were getting our dinner at whatever restaurant we’d selected for that night. I’m not kidding. If you look at this chart showing newspaper advertising revenue, that’s me perched there at the highest point in the late 1990s — right before the bottom fell out. The next decade of my journalism career was filled with furloughs and layoffs. I’m convinced my job was spared only because it didn’t pay much, which brings me to my staff pick. 

Ashley Spinks was — until last week — the managing editor of the newspaper in Floyd, Virginia (population 425). She wrote, edited and laid out the weekly paper for a salary of just $36,000 a year. The corporation that owns the Floyd Press, Lee Enterprises, it seems, was ticked off that Spinks went on the record about how companies like theirs have gutted local journalism, so last week they fired her. 

This story shows what towns like Floyd lose when local journalists like Spinks are spread thin or, worse, eliminated. “’You don’t always have the capacity to do follow-up interviews, to add context and color to the stories,” Spinks told the radio station. “But even more important than that ... what are you not reporting on?” 

For the past decade, I have worked in a small newsroom here at the ASBMB, and during that time my admiration for journalists like Spinks has grown. I know that sinking feeling that we are missing important stories, and I hate that we sometimes have to leave it to bigger outlets to cover issues that are in our lane. 

My first instinct was to say that I hope a bigger, fancier paper scoops up Spinks now that she’s a free agent, but I thought about it a little more and decided that I hope she lands somewhere that’s good to her and that pays her what she’s worth.

— Angela Hopp, communications director and ASBMB Today executive editor