Serving the High Plains
QCS Managing Editor
I spent much of the weekend with incurable romantics.
These are people who do things not to get rich but because they really want to or they feel compelled to for reasons that escape even themselves.
They follow their hearts, even as reason urges them to do something sensible.
The incurable romantics, however, are usually really good at what they do. Not always, but usually. The people I found myself with over the weekend were among the really good ones.
Friday evening it was poets.
They work at other jobs, but some traveled 176 miles from Albuquerque to be in Tucumcari for a chance to read their stuff in front of sizeable, appreciative crowd. The folks in Tucumcari loved it.
The poets did, too, especially when people in the crowd would respond to their lines like worshippers at a camp meeting.
The poets, both the visitors and some really outstanding locals, know that poetry emerges from singular ideas and endless rewriting. When the words gleam in the sun, a poet still makes changes all the way to the printing press.
It usually doesn’t pay a dime, but a good poem stands as a monument to its creator. Money can’t match that. That’s why poets keep at it.
On Saturday, I found myself amid a far more familiar crowd of the incurable: fellow newspaper journalists.
The event was the University of New Mexico’s annual Daily Lobo Boot Camp, a job fair for students who will carry on the tradition of news in print.
The recent history of newspapers is less than encouraging. Even stalwarts like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune seem to be suffering declines in readership.
Acknowledged.
But print reporters and editors are hooked, partially because they know that, with or without riches, their product is indispensable. Somebody’s got to let people know what’s going on in solid form.
I listened with the students as a panel of fellow small-town newspaper editors talked about the grind they love and where to find work like that in journalism. The answer: With us.
And here’s the pitch:
While we can’t offer good pay, we offer priceless experience you can’t buy. I was glad to hear fellow editors observe that a few years on a small newspaper is the best graduate school you could ever hope for.
At a small-town paper, you’ll do it all. You do the research, conduct the interviews, write the stories, take photos, edit copy, and even answer calls from irate readers who didn’t get their paper.
You’ll do everything that needs to be done to pull off what one editor called “the daily miracle,” the final printed product.
Forty-hour week? In your dreams!
But one day you might wake up and realize you wouldn’t want to do anything else.
If that happens, you join our corps of incurable romantics who find their wealth in living to do work they love, not just working to live.
If that’s what drives you, come on down.
Steve Hansen is the managing editor at the Quay County Sun. He can be reached at [email protected]