Inquirer Reporter bids farewell

By Sarah Einselen

Inquirer Reporter

In case you haven’t heard yet, I’m mov­ing. To the mid­dle of nowhere.

After ten won­der­ful months as the reporter at The Galion Inquirer, I am mov­ing on to work at a daily news­pa­per in Logans­port, Indi­ana, a town about 1.5 times the size of Bucyrus. The city is the county seat of Cass County in north­ern Indi­ana, about 70 miles west-southwest of Fort Wayne.

Its news­pa­per, the Logans­port Pharos-Tribune, is pub­lished six days a week with a cir­cu­la­tion of 10,000. I’ll be one of three full-time news reporters and will work with a full-time pho­tog­ra­pher on some assignments.

This week­end is my last with the Inquirer. On Tues­day, March 20, I start work in Logans­port, doing basi­cally the same thing as I do here—just less web­site man­age­ment and pag­i­na­tion work (that’s putting arti­cles and pic­tures on the pages) and more writing.

And I found an apart­ment with stained glass win­dows in the kitchen. That is worth as much to me as a new red sports car would be to my dad!

Of course, I’m excited for the new job. To under­stand just how much, you have to know that I’m flu­ent in Span­ish and that my cousins are some of my best friends in the world. The prospect of work­ing at a daily news­pa­per in a town with about 3,000 Spanish-speaking peo­ple among its res­i­dents, only a forty-five-minute drive from half my extended fam­ily, is what made me con­sider apply­ing for the job in the first place.

And even with those treats in store, I’m going to miss Galion.

This was my first job after col­lege, you know. I came here last May as a fresh grad­u­ate with degrees in jour­nal­ism and Span­ish from Mount Ver­non Nazarene Uni­ver­sity. Work­ing at the Inquirer at first meant a crash course in cov­er­ing local gov­ern­ment and com­mu­nity news. That’s not some­thing they really teach you in col­lege. You have to learn it by doing it—and true to my 4-H back­ground, that’s what I did.

I’ve enjoyed it. Many won­der­ful peo­ple in Galion and else­where around Craw­ford County were will­ing to go the extra mile with me, in my early months, so I could simul­ta­ne­ously learn my job and learn what they were doing that was so news­wor­thy. They even let me take their pic­tures, an expe­ri­ence I know ter­ri­fies some people.

Over the last sev­eral months, I’ve been able to get to know some of the “news­mak­ers” bet­ter. I’ve tried to tell most of them in per­son that I’m mov­ing on, and each time, they ask me to keep in touch. I’ll try, because frankly, I’ll miss them every bit as much as they say they’ll miss me.

Jour­nal­is­tic prin­ci­ples of truth-telling and accu­racy had been drilled into me in col­lege, but Galion is where I learned how to apply them. Some­times that meant tak­ing a whole page’s worth of pho­tos to accu­rately show the breadth of activ­i­ties going on at the county fair or Okto­ber­fest. Some­times that meant spend­ing hours on the phone and on com­puter, research­ing con­fus­ing facts and fig­ures so I could get them clear in my own mind and write about them clearly for others.

Then when I suc­ceeded, and my news reports were fair, accu­rate and com­plete, it made my day to hear that some­one ben­e­fited from them. Four kind notes are dis­played next to my desk, each one related to a dif­fer­ent arti­cle I wrote. Many more com­men­da­tions have been given me in per­son, by e-mail and second-hand through a coworker or friend. Some came from peo­ple I’ve never met. To each one of you who’s said or writ­ten some­thing to encour­age me, I thank you.

My edi­tor, Rachel Mendell, is cur­rently in the process of hir­ing another reporter to fill my place. She has asked me to write an occa­sional col­umn to let you know how I’m doing. And I’m going to try to keep up with what’s going on back here.

Galion was the first home­town I got to adopt. I chose to live in Galion, if only for a few months. I’ve never had cause to regret my deci­sion. I hope you haven’t, either.

Posted by Sarah Einselen on Mar 15 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.