I’ve spent pretty much my entire professional life working as a journalist, currently covering the city of Westbrook, Maine, just outside Portland, for the American Journal, a small weekly at Current Publishing. It’s the classic if-it-happens-you’d-better-know-about-it beat reporting I started with, so you might say I’ve come full circle.
Before that, I worked for three years as associate editor for Supply Chain Management Review, a magazine that covers all aspects of supply chain management. I solicited and edited dozens of articles, most of them several thousand words in length, written by academics, industry insiders and analysts. The writing quality was all over the place, but almost all of them demanded, even for an industry publication, a clarifying of jargon, paring down of unnecessary passages, and other streamlining that was critical to making the content digestible. I also helped organize and generate content for the company’s website, an experience that taught me how to use WordPress.
Prior to that, I worked for three years for The Daily News Transcript, a daily based in Needham and Norwood, Mass., part of Community Newspapers, Inc., which at the time was connected to the Boston Herald. My primary beat was police and court reporting, but I also was an “at large” reporter for the general area, which included four communities just outside of Boston.
Before that, I worked for two years for Foster’s Sunday Citizen, the Sunday edition of Foster’s Daily Democrat in Dover, N.H. It was our job to take stories of the week and dig deeper, uncovering and exploring the deeper issues. If, for example, a man was shot by police during the week in the middle of a bipolar episode, it was my job to find out why it got to that point, and whether or not the system failed that man and put people in danger. I also did enterprise pieces, like a five-part series on hospice which earned myself and the paper’s then-chief photographer a New England Press Association award for best health and medical reporting.
And going back farther than that, I worked for Seacoast Newspapers, Inc., now known as Seacoast Media Group, as a beat reporter for The Hampton Union and The Rockingham News. Again, my beats were small towns, and the assignment was simple: Anything that happened there, I needed to know about it, and write about it, preferably with photos to go with it. I averaged six stories a week, which adds up to over 600 stories in the first two years of my career alone.
I attended Northeastern University’s journalism program. I currently live in Maine, with my wife Michelle.
