A legacy byline

Bernie Casserly died this past week.
He gave me my first job - reporter for the Catholic Bulletin (now the Catholic Spirit) and allowed for my first "real" byline.
Bernie was also my mentor. I didn't realize that, however, until many, many years after I moved on to other communities and other jobs.
Bernie respected reporters, and had this belief that, no matter where they practiced their craft, writers should be paid a fair salary -union scale. You can image my surprise when I learned, as a rookie reporter, that my salary was to be the same as the reporters at the Pioneer Dispatch.
As a publisher, he was encouraging -always with a big smile- yet careful not to let you tread onto ground you weren't ready for. I started work at the Bulletin in June of 1969, and I didn't get my first byline until sometime in September. I hope it wasn't because I disappointed him with my writing. I like to think he wanted to make sure "I" felt comfortable with the responsibility that comes with having your name attached to your work.
Over the years, I ran into Bernie at conventions. I always made a point of greeting him (gently reminding him of who I am) and thanking him for giving me a break and a push on the path to a career in journalism. That alway put a smile on his face.
Bernie taught me to respect the craft of journalism and respect the people who choose it as a career.
I can hope to make as great a difference in a student's life as Bernie made in mine.

Rekindling my love affair with community journalism

Four years is a long time to be away from something you love.
My 25 years as editor and reporter at community papers, especially my stint in the small western Minnesota burg of Montevideo where I raised my kids and owned a business, left me with memories of feeling connected to the people I wrote about and a tremendous pride in recording a community's history.
Heading out last week on our road trip to visit seven community newspapers in three days - traveling over 900 miles - I wondered if I might find that my love affair with community journalism was just an illusion - that the years away from the trade had washed aside all negatives of 24-7 living, breathing the news and stories of the people who shared a geographical space with me.
As representatives of the University of Minnesota School of Journalism, my co-teacher Joni Berg and I had our list of questions for the editors we were to visit, our digital gadgets to record our trip for a promised presentation on the state of community journalism, especially in rural Minnesota.
But for me, well, this trip was about something else - I hoped to find some shining star out there that I could hang on to regarding the future of journalism.
Living in the metro area, it's been hard watching the slow death of daily papers with their shrinking news holes, staff cuts and lost circulation. As paper and ink prices rise, the disease is hitting the suburban weeklies as well.
This has left me with questions about the future of the news business and the craft of newsgathering. Are "those" people right? Is the newspaper dead?
Maybe the situation is different at the smaller outlying community papers, especially the ones with local owners, I mused.
Lately I've been asking myself the question that students and their parents gotta be asking too - Why would any 18- to 21-year-old go to school for four years to be a journalist, amass debt only to look forward to a job that pays little and promises no stability?
With a new class year starting soon, new students eager to take up the quill, I need to match their enthusiasm.
This trip I hoped, would give it to me.