Here is the checklist for news story format which you requested. It's also posted on the Grace Portal.
Checklist for Newspaper Story Format
1. Times Roman typeface, 12 point
2. All stories double-spaced, with NO extra spaces between paragraphs
3. Indent each paragraph
4. Paragraph should be no more than 4 or 5 sentences. Three is better.
5. Headline should be a sentence, SVO (Subject, Verb and Object)
6. Center headline, Upper/lower case, over article
7. Under headline put the byline – by ….. (your name)
8. At bottom right of first page put (more) if story continues
9. At top right of second and succeeding page, put a slugline that includes (a) your last name, (b) story identifier, (c) page number
10. When story is completed, put an endmark (### or -30-) centered under last graf
11. Use AP style in all instances for dates, state abbreviations, capitalization, use of numerals, etc.
12. News stories should be inverted pyramid format, all in third person. Never use first or second person in news story. Lead graf should include as many of the 5W’s (who, what, where, when, why, and how) as possible.
13. All opinion must be quoted and attributed. Only in opinion or op/ed pieces, reviews, and perhaps sports may the reporter inject any personal opinion.
14. Vary the use of quotes with a judicious mixture of direct quote, partial quote, and indirect (paraphrase) quotation.
15. Be sure the most important news element is in the lead. Don’t “bury the lead” by having the REAL news down in the story somewhere.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
An In-Depth Look at the Reporting Life of Ruth Anne
From the Minnesota newspaper where Ruth Anne Maddox worked. Note the comments on her work, and the comments by Times-Union editor Gary Gerard.
Once you met Ruth Anne, you knew her
By Shawn Hogendorf, Correspondent
On Wednesday morning, Ruth Anne Maddox was supposed to write the news, not make the headlines.
When Ruth Anne got out of bed in the morning, the world became a brighter place. After she was found murdered in her Prior Lake home early Wednesday, a dark cloud was cast over those who knew her both as a friend and respected journalist throughout the community.
Her wit, love of words, grammar and ability to tell a story was unparalleled, colleagues said.
One friend, a former reporter for the Shakopee Valley News, remembers a conversation with Ruth Anne about the crazy hours reporters work.
Mary (Sasa) Hilde remembers Ruth Anne saying: “I often work 10-plus hour days and just keep going; I like to consider it loyalty, but it’s probably just stupidity.”
That’s the type of witty humor and honesty anyone who came in contact with Ruth Anne came to know.
She was also known for her passion for the trade.
Pat Minelli, editor of the Valley News, where Ruth Anne worked for the last year, said before she came to the Valley News, he always admired her writing, in particular her columns while she was writing for the Savage Pacer.
“After she left the Pacer, I was thrilled with the opportunity to entice her to the Shakopee Valley News,” Minelli said.
Ruth Anne had respect for everyone she came in contact with, whether it was while covering school board meetings or interviewing sources for feature stories, Minelli said. Even when she wrote news that wasn’t so pleasant for her sources, people still respected her, he said.
“Whenever I was on the street, people would come up to me, gushing with compliments for her,” Minelli said. “It was unbelievable how well she was liked. I have never had a reporter that so many people would go out of their way to say how much they enjoyed her.”
Sarah Koehn, assistant to the superintendent of Shakopee Schools, generally sat next to Ruth Anne during the Shakopee School Board meetings and said the two got to know each other well, both professionally and personally.
Koehn said Ruth Anne usually mentioned her 19-year-old daughter, and did so while covering the meeting the night before she disappeared. She was looking forward to strengthening their relationship when she moved back to her home state of Indiana at the end of the year, Koehn said. Ruth Anne had recently told the Valley News she would be resigning.
Minelli received an e-mail from a Girl Scout troop leader Ruth Anne recently wrote a story about. The leader noted how thrilled the girls were to meet Ruth Anne, an ex-Girl Scout herself.
“She took an extraordinary time to talk with the girls and look at their badges,” Minelli said. “That is the way she did her job, and that is why everyone liked her.”
There were two things to know about Ruth Anne, co-workers said: 1) If you’re writing a text message or e-mail, make sure your grammar was correct, and 2) never, ever call her Ruth.
“Ruth Anne always wrote very clean copy,” Minelli said. “She is one of the better writers I have ever had in that way. She had an eagle eye. It was very rare that she ever had a typo.”
When Ruth Anne was able to get away from her job, she was sure to be found with two dog leashes for her dogs, Quincy and Roxxi, in her hands and a pocket full of treats for any other dogs she came across at the Cleary Lake Dog Park.
That’s who Ruth Anne was, her friends say: a caring friend, a confidant, a loving mother, a dedicated employee, a beloved sister, an animal lover, a daughter and a person always willing to take responsibility, forgive and move on.
Ruth Anne was born Aug. 20, 1963, in Chicago Heights, Ill., to Paul and Lois (Whitehead) Lipka, who currently live in Lake Placid, Fla. She was previously married to Mark Long. Family members and several close friends were too distraught to comment on Ruth Anne’s death this week, but her mother posted a comment at www.shakopeenews.com describing Ruth Anne as a “daddy’s girl.”
Her mother wrote, “As her mother we had a lot in common and got along very well, but first and foremost she was her Dad's daughter. When her sisters and brother wanted something special, they always said, ‘Ruth Anne, you ask him 'cuz he never says ‘no’ to you.’“And Ruth Anne adored her Dad,” her mother continued. “She was never embarrassed by him like most kids are when they are growing up. She listened to him and observed what he did and said. What she learned from him showed up in her writing. I recently read one of her blogs and it was all about his funny ‘adages.’ I’ve heard them for over 50 years and they drive me crazy, but not her. She could have written an entire book about her Dad and his funny sayings. Ruth Anne always (had) a beautiful smile and (was) an enjoyable clown.”
As a reporter who covered the Savage Police Department and the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage School District for the Pacer from 2004 through 2007, Ruth Anne interviewed many people on a regular basis, said Capt. Dave Muelken.
“She approached her work in a friendly manner – and with dedication to get the story and get it right,” he said. “Her work was a benefit not only to newspaper readers but to the city of Savage in providing fair and accurate coverage of the matters affecting our citizens. We are saddened by her death and extend our deepest condolences to her co-workers, her family and her friends.”
Pacer editor Nancy Huddleston hired Ruth Anne when she first moved to the Twin Cities area from Indiana. She jumped into the job feet first and never looked back, Huddleston remembers.
“Her primary dedication to the newspaper was to its readers, to make sure she got their story,” she said. “So many people were touched by her thoughtfulness not only as a reporter but as a great person. If you met Ruth Anne once, you always remembered her for her laughter, wonderful smile and caring personality. Her contributions to the Pacer cannot be put into words, as there were so many.”
Muelken remembered Ruth Anne as a person who always had a smile on her face, was friendly and giggly. She was also thorough and always did her job well, he said.
Although police and reporters don't always see eye-to-eye on what should be public information, Muelken said Ruth Anne was always diplomatic, had the interest of the citizens in mind; and was responsible, fair and factual in her writing.
“She never wrote a story from one direction,” he said.
Most police officers don’t want to talk to the media because they don’t trust them, Muelken said. That wasn’t the case with Ruth Anne.
“If you looked up the definition of a police reporter in the dictionary, you wouldn’t find her picture,” Muelken said of a relationship that developed over years of sitting across a desk discussing the police calls for the week. “She just wasn’t your typical police reporter.”
As a reader of the paper, Muelken added, her feature stories are what made her unique. “She was kind of a character,” he said.
Besides covering police, Ruth Anne was always willing to share a piece of herself with her readers through blogs, personal columns and quirky details that became part of the story, Muelken said.
“I never saw her down,” he said. “She always found the light in a dark situation.”
That light also showed through in Ruth Anne’s numerous comments across Southwest Newspapers’ Web sites and blogs that were written so well.
Ruth Anne captivated Shakopee readers with her blogs that were constantly among the most read and can be read at www.shakopeevalleynews.com.
In one of Ruth Anne’s blog posts, largely focused on exercise and eating healthy, she highlighted the ups and downs of hard work and dedication to improve her life, along with the strife of dieting in an entertaining way that kept readers on the edge of their seat waiting for her next post.
Ruth Anne also wrote passionately about her two dogs, a pit bull-rottweiler mix, Quincy, and a pit bull named Roxxi. Her blog was titled “A pitty-ful dog,” and she advocated for the breed, posted humorous pictures of her two “babies” and titled entries with comical headlines like “If I had to live in a van down by the river, my dogs would be happy as clams,” where she wrote of her companions’ swimming experience in the dog park.
Lori Carlson, editor of the Prior Lake American, recalls how easily Ruth Anne fit in when she joined the staff of the Pacer, which shares an office with the American.“She instantly became an office favorite,” Carlson said. “Ruth Anne always had a story to tell. I spent a lot of time exchanging pet stories with her, and we would arrange to meet up at the dog park. She was just a bright, smiling person. When I had meetings to attend in our Shakopee office, I’d always make sure to stop and talk to her.”
“Ruth Anne’s blogs on our Web site were amazing,” Minelli said. “It was always a hoot to read. She was tremendously gifted. People would get a kick out of things like what she did last night, and not everyone can do that.”
The entertaining style of writing and her ability to capture readers came naturally to Ruth Anne, because it was a part of her personality, Minelli said. Her life wasn’t totally happy – those close to her knew she was having a tough time in her marriage – but the average person would never know it. She was laughing constantly, whether it was on the phone or just chatting, he said.
“I am amazed she could be so happy, witty and comical, when you know everything wasn’t perfect,” Minelli added. “She would talk about things that weren’t so good in her life, but she always put it away, closed that drawer and then lightened the mood and made everyone else feel good.”
Although blogs are generally about personal experiences, Ruth Anne always had a knack for asking the right questions and picking the interesting detail to tell her stories.
She was always able to bring out the best in her sources. Just when the source thought there was nothing more that could be printed, she found the question that made the story a keepsake. Ruth Anne always found the time to stick around after an event to get to know people on a level deeper than the surface, and this always shined through in her work.
Her ability to organize and keep in constant contact with sources was the reason she never got “scooped” on a story.
On the weekends, Ruth Anne also worked part-time at Kohl’s in St. Louis Park.
Before moving to Prior Lake, Ruth Anne was a general-assignment reporter covering police and courts as well as a lifestyles editor for the Times-Union in Warsaw, Ind., where she worked from 1987 to 2003. During her tenure, she reported under the bylines of Ruth Anne Lipka and Ruth Anne Long.
Times-Union General Manager Gary Gerard, who worked with Ruth Anne for 14 years, said he was “lucky enough to inherit her as a reporter” when he began his career with the newspaper in 1988.
As a reporter, Ruth Anne was hard-working,enterprising and always able to come up with unique and interesting story ideas, Gerard said. “There was never a slow news day with Ruth Anne on our staff,” he said.
Her great sense of humor, wit and ability to make others laugh were all traits Gerard remembers vividly. “She would come through the door and look at us and say something like, ‘I’m just delightful. Everyone just loves me,’ Gerard said. “She was always bubbly. That was the way she was when I met her.”
Ruth Anne’s ability to root out a story was incredible in a coverage area where she was responsible for four judges, four courts and a county of 75,000 people, he said. It was a big job, and she had a system for tracking things through the courts and keeping up with everything.
The Times-Union went online in 1996, and Gerard said to this day when a new police and courts reporter starts with the newspaper, he goes back to when Ruth Anne covered police and courts, pulls up a month’s worth of her work and tells reporters that’s what he expects from them.
“She is still the benchmark, the standard for reporters at this paper,” he said.
Upon hearing the news of Ruth Anne’s murder, Gerard said the initial reaction was shock.
“I was stunned,” he said. “I couldn’t believe someone could do this to her, or want to do such a thing to her. My solemn hope is that justice in this case is swift and severe.”
Colleen Hatami, a friend of Ruth Anne’s since the two were in middle school orchestra together, said she is choosing to focus on the laughter and love her friend offered, not the way she died.
“Today I choose not to be full of hate, anger, guilt, ugliness and resentment towards her death. I woke up and chose to fill my heart full of all the love I have for Ruth Anne,” Hatami said.
A long-time friend and former co-worker with her at the Times-Union, Vicki Taylor, said “Ruth Anne was an instant friend. That is just who she was. You couldn’t help but love her. She was the funniest person I ever met and the one person you would want to cross paths with if you were in a bad mood.
“I always told her she was a younger version of Erma Bombeck.”
Once you met Ruth Anne, you knew her
By Shawn Hogendorf, Correspondent
On Wednesday morning, Ruth Anne Maddox was supposed to write the news, not make the headlines.
When Ruth Anne got out of bed in the morning, the world became a brighter place. After she was found murdered in her Prior Lake home early Wednesday, a dark cloud was cast over those who knew her both as a friend and respected journalist throughout the community.
Her wit, love of words, grammar and ability to tell a story was unparalleled, colleagues said.
One friend, a former reporter for the Shakopee Valley News, remembers a conversation with Ruth Anne about the crazy hours reporters work.
Mary (Sasa) Hilde remembers Ruth Anne saying: “I often work 10-plus hour days and just keep going; I like to consider it loyalty, but it’s probably just stupidity.”
That’s the type of witty humor and honesty anyone who came in contact with Ruth Anne came to know.
She was also known for her passion for the trade.
Pat Minelli, editor of the Valley News, where Ruth Anne worked for the last year, said before she came to the Valley News, he always admired her writing, in particular her columns while she was writing for the Savage Pacer.
“After she left the Pacer, I was thrilled with the opportunity to entice her to the Shakopee Valley News,” Minelli said.
Ruth Anne had respect for everyone she came in contact with, whether it was while covering school board meetings or interviewing sources for feature stories, Minelli said. Even when she wrote news that wasn’t so pleasant for her sources, people still respected her, he said.
“Whenever I was on the street, people would come up to me, gushing with compliments for her,” Minelli said. “It was unbelievable how well she was liked. I have never had a reporter that so many people would go out of their way to say how much they enjoyed her.”
Sarah Koehn, assistant to the superintendent of Shakopee Schools, generally sat next to Ruth Anne during the Shakopee School Board meetings and said the two got to know each other well, both professionally and personally.
Koehn said Ruth Anne usually mentioned her 19-year-old daughter, and did so while covering the meeting the night before she disappeared. She was looking forward to strengthening their relationship when she moved back to her home state of Indiana at the end of the year, Koehn said. Ruth Anne had recently told the Valley News she would be resigning.
Minelli received an e-mail from a Girl Scout troop leader Ruth Anne recently wrote a story about. The leader noted how thrilled the girls were to meet Ruth Anne, an ex-Girl Scout herself.
“She took an extraordinary time to talk with the girls and look at their badges,” Minelli said. “That is the way she did her job, and that is why everyone liked her.”
There were two things to know about Ruth Anne, co-workers said: 1) If you’re writing a text message or e-mail, make sure your grammar was correct, and 2) never, ever call her Ruth.
“Ruth Anne always wrote very clean copy,” Minelli said. “She is one of the better writers I have ever had in that way. She had an eagle eye. It was very rare that she ever had a typo.”
When Ruth Anne was able to get away from her job, she was sure to be found with two dog leashes for her dogs, Quincy and Roxxi, in her hands and a pocket full of treats for any other dogs she came across at the Cleary Lake Dog Park.
That’s who Ruth Anne was, her friends say: a caring friend, a confidant, a loving mother, a dedicated employee, a beloved sister, an animal lover, a daughter and a person always willing to take responsibility, forgive and move on.
Ruth Anne was born Aug. 20, 1963, in Chicago Heights, Ill., to Paul and Lois (Whitehead) Lipka, who currently live in Lake Placid, Fla. She was previously married to Mark Long. Family members and several close friends were too distraught to comment on Ruth Anne’s death this week, but her mother posted a comment at www.shakopeenews.com describing Ruth Anne as a “daddy’s girl.”
Her mother wrote, “As her mother we had a lot in common and got along very well, but first and foremost she was her Dad's daughter. When her sisters and brother wanted something special, they always said, ‘Ruth Anne, you ask him 'cuz he never says ‘no’ to you.’“And Ruth Anne adored her Dad,” her mother continued. “She was never embarrassed by him like most kids are when they are growing up. She listened to him and observed what he did and said. What she learned from him showed up in her writing. I recently read one of her blogs and it was all about his funny ‘adages.’ I’ve heard them for over 50 years and they drive me crazy, but not her. She could have written an entire book about her Dad and his funny sayings. Ruth Anne always (had) a beautiful smile and (was) an enjoyable clown.”
As a reporter who covered the Savage Police Department and the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage School District for the Pacer from 2004 through 2007, Ruth Anne interviewed many people on a regular basis, said Capt. Dave Muelken.
“She approached her work in a friendly manner – and with dedication to get the story and get it right,” he said. “Her work was a benefit not only to newspaper readers but to the city of Savage in providing fair and accurate coverage of the matters affecting our citizens. We are saddened by her death and extend our deepest condolences to her co-workers, her family and her friends.”
Pacer editor Nancy Huddleston hired Ruth Anne when she first moved to the Twin Cities area from Indiana. She jumped into the job feet first and never looked back, Huddleston remembers.
“Her primary dedication to the newspaper was to its readers, to make sure she got their story,” she said. “So many people were touched by her thoughtfulness not only as a reporter but as a great person. If you met Ruth Anne once, you always remembered her for her laughter, wonderful smile and caring personality. Her contributions to the Pacer cannot be put into words, as there were so many.”
Muelken remembered Ruth Anne as a person who always had a smile on her face, was friendly and giggly. She was also thorough and always did her job well, he said.
Although police and reporters don't always see eye-to-eye on what should be public information, Muelken said Ruth Anne was always diplomatic, had the interest of the citizens in mind; and was responsible, fair and factual in her writing.
“She never wrote a story from one direction,” he said.
Most police officers don’t want to talk to the media because they don’t trust them, Muelken said. That wasn’t the case with Ruth Anne.
“If you looked up the definition of a police reporter in the dictionary, you wouldn’t find her picture,” Muelken said of a relationship that developed over years of sitting across a desk discussing the police calls for the week. “She just wasn’t your typical police reporter.”
As a reader of the paper, Muelken added, her feature stories are what made her unique. “She was kind of a character,” he said.
Besides covering police, Ruth Anne was always willing to share a piece of herself with her readers through blogs, personal columns and quirky details that became part of the story, Muelken said.
“I never saw her down,” he said. “She always found the light in a dark situation.”
That light also showed through in Ruth Anne’s numerous comments across Southwest Newspapers’ Web sites and blogs that were written so well.
Ruth Anne captivated Shakopee readers with her blogs that were constantly among the most read and can be read at www.shakopeevalleynews.com.
In one of Ruth Anne’s blog posts, largely focused on exercise and eating healthy, she highlighted the ups and downs of hard work and dedication to improve her life, along with the strife of dieting in an entertaining way that kept readers on the edge of their seat waiting for her next post.
Ruth Anne also wrote passionately about her two dogs, a pit bull-rottweiler mix, Quincy, and a pit bull named Roxxi. Her blog was titled “A pitty-ful dog,” and she advocated for the breed, posted humorous pictures of her two “babies” and titled entries with comical headlines like “If I had to live in a van down by the river, my dogs would be happy as clams,” where she wrote of her companions’ swimming experience in the dog park.
Lori Carlson, editor of the Prior Lake American, recalls how easily Ruth Anne fit in when she joined the staff of the Pacer, which shares an office with the American.“She instantly became an office favorite,” Carlson said. “Ruth Anne always had a story to tell. I spent a lot of time exchanging pet stories with her, and we would arrange to meet up at the dog park. She was just a bright, smiling person. When I had meetings to attend in our Shakopee office, I’d always make sure to stop and talk to her.”
“Ruth Anne’s blogs on our Web site were amazing,” Minelli said. “It was always a hoot to read. She was tremendously gifted. People would get a kick out of things like what she did last night, and not everyone can do that.”
The entertaining style of writing and her ability to capture readers came naturally to Ruth Anne, because it was a part of her personality, Minelli said. Her life wasn’t totally happy – those close to her knew she was having a tough time in her marriage – but the average person would never know it. She was laughing constantly, whether it was on the phone or just chatting, he said.
“I am amazed she could be so happy, witty and comical, when you know everything wasn’t perfect,” Minelli added. “She would talk about things that weren’t so good in her life, but she always put it away, closed that drawer and then lightened the mood and made everyone else feel good.”
Although blogs are generally about personal experiences, Ruth Anne always had a knack for asking the right questions and picking the interesting detail to tell her stories.
She was always able to bring out the best in her sources. Just when the source thought there was nothing more that could be printed, she found the question that made the story a keepsake. Ruth Anne always found the time to stick around after an event to get to know people on a level deeper than the surface, and this always shined through in her work.
Her ability to organize and keep in constant contact with sources was the reason she never got “scooped” on a story.
On the weekends, Ruth Anne also worked part-time at Kohl’s in St. Louis Park.
Before moving to Prior Lake, Ruth Anne was a general-assignment reporter covering police and courts as well as a lifestyles editor for the Times-Union in Warsaw, Ind., where she worked from 1987 to 2003. During her tenure, she reported under the bylines of Ruth Anne Lipka and Ruth Anne Long.
Times-Union General Manager Gary Gerard, who worked with Ruth Anne for 14 years, said he was “lucky enough to inherit her as a reporter” when he began his career with the newspaper in 1988.
As a reporter, Ruth Anne was hard-working,enterprising and always able to come up with unique and interesting story ideas, Gerard said. “There was never a slow news day with Ruth Anne on our staff,” he said.
Her great sense of humor, wit and ability to make others laugh were all traits Gerard remembers vividly. “She would come through the door and look at us and say something like, ‘I’m just delightful. Everyone just loves me,’ Gerard said. “She was always bubbly. That was the way she was when I met her.”
Ruth Anne’s ability to root out a story was incredible in a coverage area where she was responsible for four judges, four courts and a county of 75,000 people, he said. It was a big job, and she had a system for tracking things through the courts and keeping up with everything.
The Times-Union went online in 1996, and Gerard said to this day when a new police and courts reporter starts with the newspaper, he goes back to when Ruth Anne covered police and courts, pulls up a month’s worth of her work and tells reporters that’s what he expects from them.
“She is still the benchmark, the standard for reporters at this paper,” he said.
Upon hearing the news of Ruth Anne’s murder, Gerard said the initial reaction was shock.
“I was stunned,” he said. “I couldn’t believe someone could do this to her, or want to do such a thing to her. My solemn hope is that justice in this case is swift and severe.”
Colleen Hatami, a friend of Ruth Anne’s since the two were in middle school orchestra together, said she is choosing to focus on the laughter and love her friend offered, not the way she died.
“Today I choose not to be full of hate, anger, guilt, ugliness and resentment towards her death. I woke up and chose to fill my heart full of all the love I have for Ruth Anne,” Hatami said.
A long-time friend and former co-worker with her at the Times-Union, Vicki Taylor, said “Ruth Anne was an instant friend. That is just who she was. You couldn’t help but love her. She was the funniest person I ever met and the one person you would want to cross paths with if you were in a bad mood.
“I always told her she was a younger version of Erma Bombeck.”
Retiring Newspaper Man Reflects on 35-Year Career
Here is a very interesting "inside look" at the history, growth, technology change of small-town newspapering over the 35 years of this man's career in some small suburbs of the Twin Cities in Minnesota (including the papers on which Ruth Anne Maddox worked). Note some of the changes that occurred through the years, particularly in the way newspapers do business in a community, reasons for growth, technology changes, his predictions for the future of newspapers, and more.
Reporter, editor, witness to suburbs' growth is retiring
By Mark Weber
The president of Southwest Newspapers has announced his retirement from the company he organized and led for the past 35 years. Stan Rolfsrud, 61, combined the operations of five community newspapers in Chaska, Shakopee, Eden Prairie, Jordan and Prior Lake in the 1970s and operated them as a group. The organization also started the Chanhassen Villager and the Savage Pacer.
Southwest Newspapers, with headquarters in Shakopee, is a division of Red Wing Publishing Inc. and circulates nearly 80,000 papers weekly as well as maintaining eight newspaper Web sites and nearly a dozen specialty Web sites.
Rolfsrud credits an extraordinary population surge in the region and an explosion of information technology as critical to the expansion and success of the company. “These factors allowed me to enjoy an entire career in the same organization,” he said. “I’m grateful. It’s unusual these days to be able to do that.”
During his 35 years, Rolfsrud saw:
* the industry transform from Gutenberg-style letter press printing, using melted lead, to instant publishing world-wide on the Internet.
* the population and housing count of the Southwest Newspapers coverage area expand at a phenomenal rate, with its counties listed among the fastest growing in the country.
* little change in appetites for local news about community events and desires to connect to the neighborhood. Though tools and venues have changed, goals for editors, reporters and sales associates haven’t. Some Southwest employees have spent entire careers with Rolfsrud, and continue to practice basic community journalism.
In 1970, after earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Minnesota, Rolfsrud was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. He spent his 19-month military career at Fort Hood, Texas, becoming the sergeant in charge of the 13th Support Brigade news office.
Discharged in 1972, he borrowed a car from a brother and took the only work he could find: news editor of the upstart Carver County Sun in Chaska at $115 a week. The city boasted one stop light and an experiment called Jonathan, a “new town” development that threatened to fracture a traditional community built on brick manufacturing and the processing of beet sugar and pickles.
Nine months later a rival publisher, the late Bill McGarry, sat in Pete ‘n Barb’s hamburger joint and offered Rolfsrud a job at his Chaska Weekly Valley Herald, promising to match his Sun salary. Rolfsrud held out for $175, but it was no bargain. When he reported to the 100-year-old office building on Second Street, he had no desk or telephone.
A gleaming new photo-typesetting computer, the size of a refrigerator, stood amidst the chaos of obsolete letterpress hardware, grinding yards of yellow punch tape into columns of justified news type.
It was to be only the first of many radical changes to the newspaper business that he would witness in his 35-year career.
Not only serving as the news editor of the Herald, Rolfsrud was then the only full-time news person, working as reporter, photographer and paste-up artist. He covered city halls and the school board, banging out news stories on a manual typewriter, waxing strips of type onto layout sheets late into the night, and driving the pasteups to the printer in Young America. It was hectic and high-energy.
“Nearby, Chanhassen was busy planning its future and I covered it,” he recalled. “Every Monday night, after five hours of give and take, some of the city council and staff would adjourn to Pauly’s Bar. After last call, we’d all cross the street to the Chalet Pizza and, in the only example of civic corruption I’ve ever personally witnessed, City Engineer Bill Schoell, whose private firm held a city contract, would treat us to the super house special combination pizza with everything, including extra onions and peppers.
“I would cover the Carver County Board the following morning, often with a serious case of indigestion.”
When Shakopee’s Howard Wigfield discovered that vodka cost more after distillers converted traditional fifths to new liter bottles, Rolfsrud dashed off a humorous column. It was picked up nationally and later published in a college textbook for journalists. His shortest column ever, “Stan Rolfsrud has nothing to say,” went world-wide. A year later, Chaska postmaster Lou Grindy was startled to see it reprinted in The Reader’s Digest. “If you Google my name today,” Rolfsrud laughs, “that column shows up.
“We had a lot of fun in the ’70s,” he recalls. “During the streaking craze, we got an ‘exclusive’ shot of the ‘Chaska Streaker’ dashing across Chestnut in long johns; when prostitution was linked to saunas in Twin Cities media, we investigated a Chaska barber who kept a sauna bath. We found scattered hair clippings.”
In 1978, Rolfsrud, McGarry, Bob Suel and two others each put $1,000 in a pot and launched the Glencoe Advertiser. Rolfsrud moved briefly to Glencoe to get it started. But he was single then, and chafed at living so far from the action. He soon sold his share to McGarry, trading for more interest in Southwest. The Glencoe newspaper continues today.
Rolfsrud met his future wife at a Chaska Chamber of Commerce meeting held, ironically, in a restaurant called “First Base.” Kathleen Blethen was co-owner of a paint store, Ann Marne Decorating. A loyal Democrat, she urged him to accept a press party invitation to Hubert H. Humphrey’s home in Waverly, when the vice president was campaigning for a return to the U.S. Senate in 1976. Rolfsrud agreed and soon the couple was in the backyard, eating campaign chicken and talking about needlepoint with Muriel and Hubert.
“Kathleen was extremely impressed and it was a very cheap date,” Rolfsrud recalls. A keepsake photo of the afternoon, with the ladies in full-length bicentennial regalia, was taken with Rolfsrud’s news camera by campaign aide Al Hofstede, former mayor of Minneapolis.
In 1980 the couple married in Chanhassen’s Lake Ann Park, with Kathleen’s three daughters as witnesses.
One day Rolfsrud and the business manager went to see banker Red DuToit and borrow $12,000 from the Carver County Bank to order the next generation of phototypesetters. “It was risky,” Rolfsrud recalls. “I remember Bill looking a little pale when we got back and told him how much we had borrowed. But he wanted to move forward, too.”
Those bulky machines worked hard for years, producing thousands of newspaper pages, outside job work and even the first editions of the alternative Twin Cities weekly, City Pages, founded by a former Southwest employee, Tom Bartel.
When phototypesetting chemistry costs soared in the early ’90s, Rolfsrud’s Jordan Independent became the first PC-based newspaper in the state to compose on plain paper. Others followed. Today all Southwest Newspapers composition is done on wide flat screens, with completed electronic pages transmitted directly to the printer in Red Wing. A high-speed network bonds all voice and data communications between the group’s six community offices. The company wrote its own software to track its advertising materials.
A committee of volunteers started the Eden Prairie Community News in 1974 but, soon tiring, sold it to McGarry in 1976. The News, along with the Herald, formed the nucleus of an emerging southwest suburban newspaper group, using the synergy of combined operations. Rolfsrud orchestrated the addition of the Prior Lake American and the Jordan Independent in 1979.
Then in 1980, Red Wing Publishing purchased McGarry’s interest in the Southwest group and added its own Shakopee Valley News, eventually buying out the remaining partners. In 1985 Rolfsrud became general manager of the growing five-newspaper unit. By 1987 Chanhassen’s population was large enough to support its own newspaper so he launched the Villager; in 1994 the Savage Pacer was founded in that fast-growing suburb.
To jump-start these fledgling publications, Rolfsrud pioneered a voluntary pay system which kept circulation under control while providing needed revenue for news operations. “Readers will pay for quality work,” Rolfsrud says.
“Now people ask me how long newspapers will last,” Rolfsrud adds. “They hope newspapers will survive because they’ve grown attached to the organic nature of the product. I just say that there will be many changes, but newsprint and ink will be in play throughout my lifetime.”
The industry is experiencing a dramatic and healthy shake-out right now, he says. “Organizations unwilling or unable to adapt to new realities will be left behind, those nimble enough to continue serving the interests of their customers will thrive. That’s the way it has always been. Developments like the telegraph, telephone, radio, television and the Internet have always doomed operations unwilling to compete or co-opt. If you know what you do and are flexible enough to keep doing it, you get to survive in the best job there is: telling the stories of interesting people.
“What society has learned from the Internet is that information is worthless unless you know who provided it,” he adds. “Consider the source, we say. Politicians and other powerful people discredit newspapers because doing so makes their lives easier. Consumers use brands they trust. We want to be trusted, not elected. Telling lies is bad for business. When we post something on the Internet and brand it with the name of a 150-year-old newspaper, readers believe it to be reliable, tested information, not smoke. Trust has always been the key to the survival and prosperity of Southwest Newspapers and of this industry.
“The people running Southwest Newspapers have good skills, values and flexibility. They’ll do very well after I’m gone.”
“Stan is truly a wonderful wordsmith, but his greatest gift to Southwest was big-picture thinking,” said Laurie Hartmann, director of the company’s business and classified ad departments and publisher of three of its newspapers. “He always looked for new ways to improve our papers and stayed current with industry innovation. When Stan commits to something, he leads by example, learning everything about the subject, so he can be the go-to guy. Southwest was known for its cutting edge, and many Minnesota publishers sought his advice.”
Rolfsrud still enjoys new technology. He posts movies on YouTube under the screen name “Dursflor.” He maintains two blogs, one for family, friends and anybody interested at www.rolfsruds.blogspot.com and another for his high school alumni at www.65roundup.blogspot.com. He gets about 100 cyber visitors daily.
“It’s a wonderful time,” he says. “In my college film class, you needed a glue bottle, scissors and a lot of patience just to make a splice. Now you can do it in seconds. What a great time to be alive!”
Rolfsrud looks back on his 35-year tenure with satisfaction. “Shareholders received an excellent return on investment, hundreds of employees worked challenging, fulfilling jobs, advertisers got messages reliably delivered and the community benefited from interesting, high-quality newspapers,” he said. “Now it is time for me to go away; I have nails to sort in the garage.”
The Rolfsruds have two grandchildren; the 2-year-old spends Wednesdays with them.
A portrait of Winston Churchill hangs in their Shakopee home. “Most people honor Churchill as a charismatic leader who rallied the Brits and defended the island from invasion. I also like that he was an excellent writer. He once said, ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.’ And he did, and it is.”
Rolfsrud plans a trip with seven golfers to the classic Scottish courses this spring. He considers himself an average golfer and was delighted recently to learn that his handicap just squeaked by the cut-off for a tee time at St. Andrew’s. He winters at a golf villa in Tucson that he and Kathleen share with his two brothers and their wives.
Then what? “There’s much to do. For one thing, I would like to know what all those buttons, dials and menus on my digital camera do.”
Reporter, editor, witness to suburbs' growth is retiring
By Mark Weber
The president of Southwest Newspapers has announced his retirement from the company he organized and led for the past 35 years. Stan Rolfsrud, 61, combined the operations of five community newspapers in Chaska, Shakopee, Eden Prairie, Jordan and Prior Lake in the 1970s and operated them as a group. The organization also started the Chanhassen Villager and the Savage Pacer.
Southwest Newspapers, with headquarters in Shakopee, is a division of Red Wing Publishing Inc. and circulates nearly 80,000 papers weekly as well as maintaining eight newspaper Web sites and nearly a dozen specialty Web sites.
Rolfsrud credits an extraordinary population surge in the region and an explosion of information technology as critical to the expansion and success of the company. “These factors allowed me to enjoy an entire career in the same organization,” he said. “I’m grateful. It’s unusual these days to be able to do that.”
During his 35 years, Rolfsrud saw:
* the industry transform from Gutenberg-style letter press printing, using melted lead, to instant publishing world-wide on the Internet.
* the population and housing count of the Southwest Newspapers coverage area expand at a phenomenal rate, with its counties listed among the fastest growing in the country.
* little change in appetites for local news about community events and desires to connect to the neighborhood. Though tools and venues have changed, goals for editors, reporters and sales associates haven’t. Some Southwest employees have spent entire careers with Rolfsrud, and continue to practice basic community journalism.
In 1970, after earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Minnesota, Rolfsrud was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. He spent his 19-month military career at Fort Hood, Texas, becoming the sergeant in charge of the 13th Support Brigade news office.
Discharged in 1972, he borrowed a car from a brother and took the only work he could find: news editor of the upstart Carver County Sun in Chaska at $115 a week. The city boasted one stop light and an experiment called Jonathan, a “new town” development that threatened to fracture a traditional community built on brick manufacturing and the processing of beet sugar and pickles.
Nine months later a rival publisher, the late Bill McGarry, sat in Pete ‘n Barb’s hamburger joint and offered Rolfsrud a job at his Chaska Weekly Valley Herald, promising to match his Sun salary. Rolfsrud held out for $175, but it was no bargain. When he reported to the 100-year-old office building on Second Street, he had no desk or telephone.
A gleaming new photo-typesetting computer, the size of a refrigerator, stood amidst the chaos of obsolete letterpress hardware, grinding yards of yellow punch tape into columns of justified news type.
It was to be only the first of many radical changes to the newspaper business that he would witness in his 35-year career.
Not only serving as the news editor of the Herald, Rolfsrud was then the only full-time news person, working as reporter, photographer and paste-up artist. He covered city halls and the school board, banging out news stories on a manual typewriter, waxing strips of type onto layout sheets late into the night, and driving the pasteups to the printer in Young America. It was hectic and high-energy.
“Nearby, Chanhassen was busy planning its future and I covered it,” he recalled. “Every Monday night, after five hours of give and take, some of the city council and staff would adjourn to Pauly’s Bar. After last call, we’d all cross the street to the Chalet Pizza and, in the only example of civic corruption I’ve ever personally witnessed, City Engineer Bill Schoell, whose private firm held a city contract, would treat us to the super house special combination pizza with everything, including extra onions and peppers.
“I would cover the Carver County Board the following morning, often with a serious case of indigestion.”
When Shakopee’s Howard Wigfield discovered that vodka cost more after distillers converted traditional fifths to new liter bottles, Rolfsrud dashed off a humorous column. It was picked up nationally and later published in a college textbook for journalists. His shortest column ever, “Stan Rolfsrud has nothing to say,” went world-wide. A year later, Chaska postmaster Lou Grindy was startled to see it reprinted in The Reader’s Digest. “If you Google my name today,” Rolfsrud laughs, “that column shows up.
“We had a lot of fun in the ’70s,” he recalls. “During the streaking craze, we got an ‘exclusive’ shot of the ‘Chaska Streaker’ dashing across Chestnut in long johns; when prostitution was linked to saunas in Twin Cities media, we investigated a Chaska barber who kept a sauna bath. We found scattered hair clippings.”
In 1978, Rolfsrud, McGarry, Bob Suel and two others each put $1,000 in a pot and launched the Glencoe Advertiser. Rolfsrud moved briefly to Glencoe to get it started. But he was single then, and chafed at living so far from the action. He soon sold his share to McGarry, trading for more interest in Southwest. The Glencoe newspaper continues today.
Rolfsrud met his future wife at a Chaska Chamber of Commerce meeting held, ironically, in a restaurant called “First Base.” Kathleen Blethen was co-owner of a paint store, Ann Marne Decorating. A loyal Democrat, she urged him to accept a press party invitation to Hubert H. Humphrey’s home in Waverly, when the vice president was campaigning for a return to the U.S. Senate in 1976. Rolfsrud agreed and soon the couple was in the backyard, eating campaign chicken and talking about needlepoint with Muriel and Hubert.
“Kathleen was extremely impressed and it was a very cheap date,” Rolfsrud recalls. A keepsake photo of the afternoon, with the ladies in full-length bicentennial regalia, was taken with Rolfsrud’s news camera by campaign aide Al Hofstede, former mayor of Minneapolis.
In 1980 the couple married in Chanhassen’s Lake Ann Park, with Kathleen’s three daughters as witnesses.
One day Rolfsrud and the business manager went to see banker Red DuToit and borrow $12,000 from the Carver County Bank to order the next generation of phototypesetters. “It was risky,” Rolfsrud recalls. “I remember Bill looking a little pale when we got back and told him how much we had borrowed. But he wanted to move forward, too.”
Those bulky machines worked hard for years, producing thousands of newspaper pages, outside job work and even the first editions of the alternative Twin Cities weekly, City Pages, founded by a former Southwest employee, Tom Bartel.
When phototypesetting chemistry costs soared in the early ’90s, Rolfsrud’s Jordan Independent became the first PC-based newspaper in the state to compose on plain paper. Others followed. Today all Southwest Newspapers composition is done on wide flat screens, with completed electronic pages transmitted directly to the printer in Red Wing. A high-speed network bonds all voice and data communications between the group’s six community offices. The company wrote its own software to track its advertising materials.
A committee of volunteers started the Eden Prairie Community News in 1974 but, soon tiring, sold it to McGarry in 1976. The News, along with the Herald, formed the nucleus of an emerging southwest suburban newspaper group, using the synergy of combined operations. Rolfsrud orchestrated the addition of the Prior Lake American and the Jordan Independent in 1979.
Then in 1980, Red Wing Publishing purchased McGarry’s interest in the Southwest group and added its own Shakopee Valley News, eventually buying out the remaining partners. In 1985 Rolfsrud became general manager of the growing five-newspaper unit. By 1987 Chanhassen’s population was large enough to support its own newspaper so he launched the Villager; in 1994 the Savage Pacer was founded in that fast-growing suburb.
To jump-start these fledgling publications, Rolfsrud pioneered a voluntary pay system which kept circulation under control while providing needed revenue for news operations. “Readers will pay for quality work,” Rolfsrud says.
“Now people ask me how long newspapers will last,” Rolfsrud adds. “They hope newspapers will survive because they’ve grown attached to the organic nature of the product. I just say that there will be many changes, but newsprint and ink will be in play throughout my lifetime.”
The industry is experiencing a dramatic and healthy shake-out right now, he says. “Organizations unwilling or unable to adapt to new realities will be left behind, those nimble enough to continue serving the interests of their customers will thrive. That’s the way it has always been. Developments like the telegraph, telephone, radio, television and the Internet have always doomed operations unwilling to compete or co-opt. If you know what you do and are flexible enough to keep doing it, you get to survive in the best job there is: telling the stories of interesting people.
“What society has learned from the Internet is that information is worthless unless you know who provided it,” he adds. “Consider the source, we say. Politicians and other powerful people discredit newspapers because doing so makes their lives easier. Consumers use brands they trust. We want to be trusted, not elected. Telling lies is bad for business. When we post something on the Internet and brand it with the name of a 150-year-old newspaper, readers believe it to be reliable, tested information, not smoke. Trust has always been the key to the survival and prosperity of Southwest Newspapers and of this industry.
“The people running Southwest Newspapers have good skills, values and flexibility. They’ll do very well after I’m gone.”
“Stan is truly a wonderful wordsmith, but his greatest gift to Southwest was big-picture thinking,” said Laurie Hartmann, director of the company’s business and classified ad departments and publisher of three of its newspapers. “He always looked for new ways to improve our papers and stayed current with industry innovation. When Stan commits to something, he leads by example, learning everything about the subject, so he can be the go-to guy. Southwest was known for its cutting edge, and many Minnesota publishers sought his advice.”
Rolfsrud still enjoys new technology. He posts movies on YouTube under the screen name “Dursflor.” He maintains two blogs, one for family, friends and anybody interested at www.rolfsruds.blogspot.com and another for his high school alumni at www.65roundup.blogspot.com. He gets about 100 cyber visitors daily.
“It’s a wonderful time,” he says. “In my college film class, you needed a glue bottle, scissors and a lot of patience just to make a splice. Now you can do it in seconds. What a great time to be alive!”
Rolfsrud looks back on his 35-year tenure with satisfaction. “Shareholders received an excellent return on investment, hundreds of employees worked challenging, fulfilling jobs, advertisers got messages reliably delivered and the community benefited from interesting, high-quality newspapers,” he said. “Now it is time for me to go away; I have nails to sort in the garage.”
The Rolfsruds have two grandchildren; the 2-year-old spends Wednesdays with them.
A portrait of Winston Churchill hangs in their Shakopee home. “Most people honor Churchill as a charismatic leader who rallied the Brits and defended the island from invasion. I also like that he was an excellent writer. He once said, ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.’ And he did, and it is.”
Rolfsrud plans a trip with seven golfers to the classic Scottish courses this spring. He considers himself an average golfer and was delighted recently to learn that his handicap just squeaked by the cut-off for a tee time at St. Andrew’s. He winters at a golf villa in Tucson that he and Kathleen share with his two brothers and their wives.
Then what? “There’s much to do. For one thing, I would like to know what all those buttons, dials and menus on my digital camera do.”
Nov. 15 is 'I Love to Write Day'
To access the website, click here:
Thank you to all of the schools, libraries, bookstores, community centers and writing groups all across the country that helped to make I Love To Write Day our biggest one yet.
Please join us again on November 15 for the seventh I Love To Write Day. To read about some of the events that took place, please click here.
Children’s Way Foundation (the non-profit developer of the virtual world, Woogi World™, www.woogiworld.com), and author of 30 years, John Riddle, are collaborating to bring to 50,000 elementary schools throughout the country, the opportunity for their to children discover and develop the talent of writing. Read the official press release here.
NEW this Year ... nominate your school, classroom, teacher or a student for an "I Love to Write Day Award of Excellence." Click here for details.
Thank you to all of the schools, libraries, bookstores, community centers and writing groups all across the country that helped to make I Love To Write Day our biggest one yet.
Please join us again on November 15 for the seventh I Love To Write Day. To read about some of the events that took place, please click here.
Children’s Way Foundation (the non-profit developer of the virtual world, Woogi World™, www.woogiworld.com), and author of 30 years, John Riddle, are collaborating to bring to 50,000 elementary schools throughout the country, the opportunity for their to children discover and develop the talent of writing. Read the official press release here.
NEW this Year ... nominate your school, classroom, teacher or a student for an "I Love to Write Day Award of Excellence." Click here for details.
Dan Wooding Reflects on Sherwood Wirt
Christian journalism loses one of its great pioneers
Sherwood Eliot Wirt, founding editor of Decision magazine has passes away at the age of 97
By Dan Wooding
Founder of ASSIST Ministries, writing from Jordan
Photo: Sherwood Wirt with Billy Graham
AMMAN, JORDAN (ANS) -- The world of Christian journalism has lost one of its great pioneers and characters, Dr. Sherwood Eliot Wirt, the founder of Billy Graham’s Decision magazine, also the San Diego Christian Writers Guild.
“Woody”, as he was known to his many friends, passed away at the age of 97 in the early morning of November 8, 2008. His wife Ruth told friends that he had “slipped away in his sleep."
Dr. Wirt, was also the author of 42 books including “Billy: A Personal Look at Billy Graham.”
He was born in 1911 and served as a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force, pastored several churches, and held Ph.D.'s in theology and psychology from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland (Class of '51).
Dr. Wirt was originally a newspaper journalist, but eventually became the founding editor of 'Decision,' a monthly magazine which Billy Graham established in the 1960s and which is still in circulation today. In 1978 he founded the San Diego Christian Writers Guild.
Dr. Wirt is known to have ministered and traveled with Dr. Graham for nearly 40 years. As a friend, Dr. Wirt knew Mr. Graham intimately and not just as a public figure.
A spokesperson for the San Diego Christian Writers Guild (SDCWG) said, “We will always be grateful to Woody for his friendship and the many things he taught us! After 97 years on earth, he is with the Lord!
“Woody had a vision to help Christian writers learn how to effectively communicate through the written word and get published while doing it!” the spokesperson added. “He started the first critique group that year. A small group of writers met monthly to help each other through constructive critiquing of each other’s work. That one group eventually grew into a network of meetings all over San Diego County and eventually into Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties.
"Today, in San Diego, ten groups meet regularly. One of the original groups, from East [San Diego] county, has been meeting for over twenty years and every member has been successfully published many times.”
I first met Woody Wirt in 1968 in London at Billy Graham’s UK offices, where I was working for The Christian and he had come over from Minneapolis to work on the UK version of Decision.
Many years later, after I had moved to the United States and he had retired to the sunshine of San Diego, we began running writer’s seminars together, which was a trip for me, as he was so lovingly eccentric in his presentations. I remember he had one talk about the “Seven Essential Tools of a Writer” which he said included owning a typewriter. I had to point out to him that in this computer age, most of his audience wouldn’t know what a typewriter was.
Most of our seminars were under the auspices of Mike MacIntosh of Horizon Christian Fellowship in San Diego who would hold his “Festival of Life” outreaches in different parts of the world and include a writer’s seminar with the two of us.
Woody was a humble person and yet he secured a real scoop that any journalist would have loved to have had. He did the very last interview wit CS Lewis before Lewis died. (See http://www.assistnews.net/STORIES/2006/s06090017.htm). He was also a columnist for ANS for many years.
He eventually left San Diego for Bothell, Washington, where he died. His memorial service will be held on December 5 at 2:00 PM at Westminster Chapel, 13646 NE 24th St., Bellevue, WA 98005.
Struggling Bookstore Makes Film on Plight
Here's an interesting story from the Washington Post on one struggling bookstore's effort to gain public support for struggling stores. To view the entire article, click here.
Dizzying Descent
Owners of Struggling Vertigo Bookstore Take A Page From the Screen
By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 15, 2008; Page C01
When you're the proud parents of a bookstore at risk of imminent death, you'll try pretty much anything to give your baby a chance -- including asking your customers to watch a documentary about other bookstores at risk of imminent death.
"It's a film about troubled bookstores. We're a troubled bookstore," Bridget Warren said matter-of-factly Thursday night as she introduced a showing of "Paperback Dreams" at Vertigo Books, the College Park store she owns with her husband, Todd Stewart.
Late last month, Warren and Stewart appealed for help in an e-mail to regular customers and a posting on the store's Web site. "Vertigo books is at risk," it began. "Vote with your dollars now if you value our local economy and this store." They didn't want to be seen as whining or asking for handouts. But they'd also watched what had happened, over the past year, to other independent area stores.
Poof! No Karibu.
Poof! No Olsson's.
Poof! No Candida's or Chapters or A Likely Story -- though Chapters remains on life support, its inventory in storage as it struggles to find a new location.
"We thought, we'll give people a heads-up that that's what will happen," Stewart explained, "if you don't come in with more than your good thoughts."
This evening, only a few came at all. Just 15 of the 25 chairs at the back of the store were filled as producer-director Alex Beckstead fired up "Paperback Dreams."
In August 2005, Beckstead went out to grab some lunch near his office in Menlo Park, Calif., and saw a note on the door of Kepler's Books announcing the legendary 50-year-old store's demise. He ran back clutching his sandwich and saying "Kepler's is closed!" as his colleagues "dropped what they were doing and said, 'WHAT?' "
They weren't alone. In one of the most heartening recent developments in the shrinking universe of independent booksellers, Kepler's customers -- among them a number of wealthy Silicon Valley denizens who loved the store -- banded together to try to save it. Around the same time, Cody's Books, an equally legendary Berkeley institution, decided to roll the dice on a big new store in San Francisco.
Beckstead thought the combined ventures had the makings of a film. He was hoping it would be a positive one.
The Vertigo audience, joined by a few latecomers, watched largely in silence as the twin tales unfolded.
Dizzying Descent
Owners of Struggling Vertigo Bookstore Take A Page From the Screen
By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 15, 2008; Page C01
When you're the proud parents of a bookstore at risk of imminent death, you'll try pretty much anything to give your baby a chance -- including asking your customers to watch a documentary about other bookstores at risk of imminent death.
"It's a film about troubled bookstores. We're a troubled bookstore," Bridget Warren said matter-of-factly Thursday night as she introduced a showing of "Paperback Dreams" at Vertigo Books, the College Park store she owns with her husband, Todd Stewart.
Late last month, Warren and Stewart appealed for help in an e-mail to regular customers and a posting on the store's Web site. "Vertigo books is at risk," it began. "Vote with your dollars now if you value our local economy and this store." They didn't want to be seen as whining or asking for handouts. But they'd also watched what had happened, over the past year, to other independent area stores.
Poof! No Karibu.
Poof! No Olsson's.
Poof! No Candida's or Chapters or A Likely Story -- though Chapters remains on life support, its inventory in storage as it struggles to find a new location.
"We thought, we'll give people a heads-up that that's what will happen," Stewart explained, "if you don't come in with more than your good thoughts."
This evening, only a few came at all. Just 15 of the 25 chairs at the back of the store were filled as producer-director Alex Beckstead fired up "Paperback Dreams."
In August 2005, Beckstead went out to grab some lunch near his office in Menlo Park, Calif., and saw a note on the door of Kepler's Books announcing the legendary 50-year-old store's demise. He ran back clutching his sandwich and saying "Kepler's is closed!" as his colleagues "dropped what they were doing and said, 'WHAT?' "
They weren't alone. In one of the most heartening recent developments in the shrinking universe of independent booksellers, Kepler's customers -- among them a number of wealthy Silicon Valley denizens who loved the store -- banded together to try to save it. Around the same time, Cody's Books, an equally legendary Berkeley institution, decided to roll the dice on a big new store in San Francisco.
Beckstead thought the combined ventures had the makings of a film. He was hoping it would be a positive one.
The Vertigo audience, joined by a few latecomers, watched largely in silence as the twin tales unfolded.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Former Warsaw Times-Union Reporter Murdered
Tim Robertson, reporter for the Warsaw Times-Union, will be with us in class Monday night. Please read this article, and we will ask him what effect this event has had on his staff. Also...I'll share a little more of the backstory with you--I have a very personal connection to this situation.
Former Warsawan Slain In Minnesota
David Slone
Times-Union Staff Writer
PRIOR LAKE, Minn. - A former Warsaw resident and Times-Union reporter was found dead in her home in Prior Lake, Minn., Wednesday morning.
Her husband is in jail on charges related to her death.
Ruth Anne Maddox, 45, worked for the Times-Union from April 1, 1987, to July 8, 2003. During her tenure at the Times-Union, she covered general assignments, as well as police and courts under the bylines of Ruth Anne Lipka and Ruth Anne Long.
According to the Star Tribune newspaper in St. Paul, Minn., police responded to the Maddox home at 16492 Timber Crest Drive SE Tuesday night to check on Ruth Anne after she was reported missing by co-workers.
Her husband, Charles Anthony "Tony" Maddox Jr., allegedly was uncooperative and would not allow police to enter the home. After a second welfare check at the residence, police secured a search warrant.
Ruth Anne's body was discovered at 3:17 a.m. Wednesday. Reports published online indicate her body was found wrapped in a tarp in an attached garage.
Tony, 43, was booked into the Scott County Jail at 4:55 a.m. Wednesday on a preliminary charge of second-degree homicide, according to an officer at the jail. No bond had been set as of Wednesday afternoon.
Lori Lambrecht, office manager for the Scott County attorney's office, said if the charges were not filed today, they would be filed Friday.
Reports indicate Ruth Anne was last seen alive by a neighbor at approximately 11:30 p.m. Monday.
According to twincities.com, Ruth Anne filed for divorce from her husband on Oct. 22.
In a telephone interview this morning, Ruth Anne's attorney for the divorce, Peter Horejsi, said a hearing for the divorce was scheduled for Nov. 6. But prior to that court date, Tony's attorney and Horejsi came to an agreement on the divorce. Horejsi said they expected the divorce to be concluded this week. Tony also agreed to be out of the house by the end of the month.
Horejsi said he learned of Ruth Anne's murder Wednesday.
According to an affidavit filed in the divorce, Ruth Anne was concerned about how her husband would react to the breakup, based on an incident of abuse that occurred a year ago when the possibility of a divorce was brought up. Horejsi said today, Ruth Anne did not expect any extreme violence. He said there was no reason to believe anything to this extent.
In February 2005, according to a police report provided by the Prior Lake Police Dept., Tony was arrested for driving while intoxicated and fleeing police in a motor vehicle. His blood alcohol content was .15.
At the time, he had an outstanding warrant from Hennepin County, Minn., for driving with a suspended license.
Lt. Randy Hofstad, Prior Lake Police Dept. spokesman, said Wednesday afternoon a cause of death had not been determined, but the case was being investigated as a homicide.
Initial reports indicate Ruth Anne was beaten, but it was unknown at press time whether any type of weapon was used.
Ruth Anne's two dogs and cat were taken to Four Paws animal shelter, according to a report in the Savage Pacer newspaper online.
Ruth Anne moved to Prior Lake from Warsaw in 2003 after marrying Tony. Ruth Anne and Tony attended high school together in Hammond and reconnected after attending a class reunion.
In Minnesota, Ruth Anne became a reporter with two newspapers owned by Southwest Newspapers. She first worked at the Savage Pacer and then at the Shakopee Valley News. She also worked part time at a Kohl's store.
Mark Weber, general manager of Southwest Newspapers, said, "We are shocked and saddened by the news.
"She was a great employee. The newspaper is keeping her friends and family in their prayers," Weber added.
Ruth Anne is survived by a daughter, two sisters, a brother and her parents.
Times-Union General Manager Gary Gerard said, "Ruth Anne was here when I was hired in 1988. She was a hard-working, talented reporter and just a really fun person to be around. She had a great sense of humor."
He added, "I can't imagine how anyone could do something like this to Ruth Anne. My solemn hope is that justice in this case is swift and severe.
"I want Ruth Anne's family to know all of us here at the Times-Union grieve with them and are keeping them in our thoughts and prayers," Gerard said.
It was the first homicide in Prior Lake since January 27, 2002. In that case a man killed his wife then took his own life, according to the Star Tribune.
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