Small-town editing: lessons in community, creativity, control and commitment
One year into her role as editor of the Pine City Pioneer, Traci LeBrun reflects on the value of a community newspaper.
by Maya Phillips
Traci LeBrun has been an editor for 11 years, working for three different publications during that time. From each newspaper, she gained new experiences and insights into the business of news writing and publication.
Her newest position — running her small town’s local newspaper — has come with unique challenges and opportunities. LeBrun uses her creative freedom to gain new insights as an editor and to impact her community in positive ways.
Q: How did you become an editor?
A: In a way, I got into editing by default. I worked as a seventh and eighth grade English teacher at a public school for a few years, but the school hired a new superintendent and made massive budget cuts, and I was let go. Then I found out that the father of one of my students owned a bunch of newspapers, and he offered me a job as an editorial assistant at one of them.
Q: What inspired you to take on the role of editor at the Pine City Pioneer?
A: I was working at the Mille Lacs Messenger, but I live in Pine City and I wanted to work in my home town and take on an important role in my community. I was excited to form community connections and to take on the responsibility of getting out the community’s news.
Q: What are your goals for the Pioneer?
A: I’ve been there for one year now, and I had a lot of goals for this first year. I had worked at two other papers and seen differences in styles between the two, and I wanted to implement a lot of their processes in Pine City. I also added a lot of new voices from the community as columnists, sports writers and stringers. I don’t want to implement much more change, but I want to see the Pioneer settle into the changes that have already been made.
Q: What are the negative and positive aspects of working as an editor?
A: A negative is that you hear a lot of terrible stories. For example, last week there was a fatal crash in Pine City involving young people who had been drinking, and that was a difficult police report to read through; I had never heard such a violent car crash before, and I had to be conscious about what I wrote because you can’t give all of that information to the public.
A positive is that you have a lot of freedom. The editor gets to run the paper, decide what stories to run each week, craft the tone of the paper, and you mostly get to determine your own schedule.
Q: What does a typical work day look like for you?
A: Mondays and Tuesdays are deadline days, so I’m busy laying out the paper and working on any last-minute stories that arose over the weekend. Those are intense days; they sometimes mean staring at a computer for twelve hours a day. Then, the paper goes out by five on Tuesday and I take Wednesdays off to decompress. But I’m not completely off the clock, I use Wednesdays to start thinking about what stories I want in the next week’s paper, and I reach out to people to set up interviews for later in the week. Thursday and Friday I write, take pictures, and go to meetings. We have a couple photographers and stringers to do some of that, but a lot of the legwork for a small town newspaper comes from the editor. But it’s all rewarding work.
Q: What does your staff look like?
A: With readily available news on social media, there’s been a trend of newspapers being stripped down to bare-bones. That’s where the Pioneer is now. We have a halftime reporter that we share with the North Pine County News, a part-time editorial assistant who does legals, classifieds, and other miscellaneous work, a receptionist, a person who manages our advertising, and a couple of sports reporters who also work at the high school as coaches. I had to fight with our overhead company to get all the staff I needed, but I have it now.
Q: What do you like about being an editor and what are some challenges you face?
A: I love the independence and creative control that come with being an editor — I cover city council, school board meetings, and other hard news that we need to put in the paper, but beyond that I also choose to include human interest stories and any other segments that I think the community will enjoy. I recently started a segment called “Secrets to Longevity” where I profile community members who are over the age of 90 and get life advice from them to share with our younger readers. It’s nice to write about their lives while they’re still living rather than only seeing them in obituaries.
Q: What are some memorable anecdotes from your time as an editor?
A: I got to photograph two presidents! I got a media pass to photograph Obama when he came to Minneapolis in 2014 to talk about gun legislation, and I was able to tie that into a local story about Pine City’s sheriff who was outspoken against gun legislation. Then, I photographed Trump when he visited Superior, Wisconsin, which is not far from Pine City.
Q: What advice would you give to a student who aspires to become an editor?
A: Make sure you’re always looking for stories. Search for pieces of a story, and then work on putting those pieces together and sharing them with others. Social media is a great tool for this. When you hear about an interesting story, dig into and learn all that you can. Of course, you also need to develop your mechanics as a writer to be able to share your stories effectively. Learn photography, study politics, expand your skill set in any way that could be useful in the newspaper business.
LeBrun has faced the challenges of her new position with confidence and changed the Pine City Pioneer in ways that she hopes will bring her community together. By dedicating herself to covering both serious community news and softer human interest stories, she hopes to draw a wide variety of readers and strengthen their ties to one another. In doing so, LeBrun has learned more about herself as an editor and storyteller, and she hopes to use these insights to continue her positive impact on the community.
