Newsprint gets injected into my veins

If you have not yet read the first part AND the second part AND the third part — while I appreciate your enthusiasm — this would probably make more sense if you started at the beginning. But do what you want; I’m not the boss of you.

After a couple years of selling exercise bikes to paralyzed people, I spun off a line of products aimed at the horse market. Apparently, a condition called “stocking up” was a huge problem, particularly with horses who were being transported by trailer long distances. As I understood it, horse legs are terribly inefficient at circulating blood and the constant contraction and counter-contraction of their leg muscles that kept them upright in a moving trailer contributed to blood and fluid pooling in their legs. That is why trainers walk the horses for several hours after a ride. I convinced one of the engineers to create a waveform that horses would tolerate and hooked it up to the stim box. Turns out, the horses we tested got addicted to the sensation and couldn’t wait to load the trailers and take a ride. Long story short, it worked. We called it Theraquine. (Yeah, I came up with that…)

The longer story is the owners partnered up with a couple of know-it-all marketers out of Maryland who believed their price and market research more than my gut and ran the product into the ground. I decided it was time to separate the contract. About that time, a friend of mine got a job in the marketing department at the Dayton Daily News. She called me almost immediately afterward and wanted me to meet with the director of Newspapers In Education (NIE). They were frustrated with their creative and an inability to execute a grand new plan with the current talent.

By this time, Rivershark was growing quite rapidly and the exercise bike people had been sucking away a lot of my time I should have been spending with other clients and growing out different divisions at Rivershark. I was hesitant to jump into another long-term contract, especially one that required that I be on-site. But, she was persuasive — pestered me constantly — and I relented. One meeting. Only one and we’ll see.

I met with the director of NIE. She explained that while other NIE programs were putting crossword puzzles and mazes on their pages, she wanted to write editorial and educational lesson plans around topics that kids were interested in. She believed that if you respected the kids’ intelligence, they would rise to the challenge. She was right; she still is.

Anyone who knows me at least marginally well knows that I love newspapers, old books, typewriters, baked goods and dogs. I’ve always wanted to work in editorial at a newspaper and this was pretty close. They wanted to hire me as an employee at a salary that made no sense. But I wanted to work there really badly. We compromised on a contract and flexibility and the Dayton Daily News NIE program got a bunch of horsepower for chicken feed. I promised two years; they got four and a half.

During my time at the newspaper, I had the opportunity to work with the most creative, dedicated and smart group of individuals I have ever known. We changed the world slightly, even though it was only for a short four years.

Aside from the great NIE team at the newspaper, working at the newspaper also gave me a great 9/11 story. The website person had gone home for the day (this is when newspapers only updated their web sites once a day and everything was done at night, after the print edition was put to bed.) Apparently, I was the only one in the building who could create, post and manage website content independently.

The photo editor at that time, Jeff Adams†, raced down to my floor and asked my director to “borrow” me for the day, or until they could reach the website producer and get her back in to work. From about 9:30am until 4:00pm, I was updating www.DaytonDailyNews.com, pulling off photos and 9/11 stories from the AP wire and posting updates as fast as we could. In 2001, the CNN.com servers were overwhelmed and people were turning to their local newspaper Web sites for updates.

I remember the day going slow and fast all at the same time. I remember how calm and professional the newsroom was, how the entire team become hyper-focused on getting local news coverage, processing photos and assembling the “bulldog” edition of the newspaper. I remember seeing a deluge of news stories on the AP wire still happening everywhere else in the world that nobody anywhere was reporting.

I remember stepping out into downtown Dayton from the Ludlow DDN bank building and how quiet traffic was and how slowly everyone walked.

And then I went home. And went to work the next day. And the next and the next.

This story is being told here is small bits for manufactured drama.
Book | Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six