Jamie (Internet remix) • Editor Edith Hughes was captivated by community journalism

Editor Edith Hughes was captivated by community journalism - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

I want to do this right, because she deserves it, and because she might haunt me otherwise.

Within minutes of my first meeting Edith, she was yelling at me. I’d missed one question—its vs. it’s—on the three-page proofing test you took before you interviewed. That was too easy a question to miss in her opinion. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t offer me a job. Or perhaps it was the fact that I’d written precisely one story for a newspaper when I was in college, and only did that because I had a crush on the editor of the school paper and she asked nicely. Or perhaps it was the fact that I brought in the first page of my senior thesis, a letter to the editor and a poem as my writing samples.

Eventually, though, she did offer me a job. It was early October in 2001. I spent most of the next 12 months trying and failing to impress her. She told me that I understood how to put sentences together, but that my writing was a sure cure for insomnia. She told me that I was playing cute with hard news.

Very occasionally, she’d give me a compliment.

She was an editor of the old type: Gruff, imperious at times and demanding. She was in charge of a dozen or so community weekly newspapers. It’s easy to dismiss those papers as pure fluff or irrelevant, but she worked to make sure they were neither. She took the work seriously and taught the reporters to do the same. If not for the encouragement (positive and negative) she gave, I wouldn’t have gotten my first job at a daily paper.

A few years after I’d left, I came back to visit people at the office. I ran into Edith and told her that I’d gotten a job as city editor at the paper where I worked. She thought about it for a second and asked, “So you learned something here?”

Yes, yes I did.