My professional career has been in two parts. The first was after I earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and worked for daily newspapers. The second was after I earned a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and then worked for trade and business media.
I don’t include the first part of my career on my LinkedIn profile. It was fun, educational and helped hone my stills in reporting, writing and editing, but it really doesn’t pertain to my current focus.
But lately I’ve been thinking about those print media days. I still have boxes of “clips” of articles from those years. I’ll probably just end up throwing them away at some point.
What spurred my nostalgia was recent headlines. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution just stopped printing a paper newspaper after 157 years and the Washington Post is slashing its staff amid a shrinking business.
It’s a tough time for print journalism after decades of business erosion due to the internet.
As an undergraduate student at U of I in the early 1980s, I worked at the Daily Illini student newspaper, which then published five days a week. Apparently it now only prints a weekly edition, called The DI, on Wednesday and is mostly focused on online news, which makes sense.
After college, I worked for the Small Newspaper Group, owned by the Small family out of Kankakee, Ill. I started at the Streator Times-Press in central Illinois. I worked there for two years (1984-86) before moving to the Daily Dispatch in Moline, Ill., and shortly thereafter the Rock Island Argus.
The Streator newspaper merged with its bigger sister newspaper in Ottawa, Ill., to serve the greater LaSalle County, Illinois, area, in September 2005.
In March 2018, Shaw Media bought the combined newspaper. (See articles by the AP, Streator Chamber of Commerce, and Dirks, Van Essen & Murray.)
I have fond memories of working in Streator, an industrial and farming community. One large factory there made glass bottles. There was a bar across the street for workers that I would go to. The bartenders would pour beer from bottles, which they would toss in a chute on the wall behind them. The bottles would smash as they fell into a container on the other side, presumably to be recycled to make new beer bottles.
When I moved to the Quad Cities to work for the Daily Dispatch and Rock Island Argus (1986-92), I lived in East Moline, Ill.
An industrial Midwest hub located on the Mississippi River dividing Illinois and Iowa, the Quad Cities are made up of Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois. There are lots of great parks and restaurants there and it is home to agriculture giant John Deere.
The two sister newspapers eventually merged operations. And in June 2017, Lee Enterprises, publisher of the rival Quad-City Times in Davenport, bought out its cross-river competition from the Small family. (See articles by Our QC News, the Quad-City Times, KWQC and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.)
Photos: My profile of Jim’s Rib Haven from the April 28, 1991, edition of the Rock Island Argus. I was saddened to hear that Jim’s Rib Haven has since closed.
