New names and faces

Regular readers to The Star News will notice some new names in story bylines and some new faces of people attending meetings and events in the past few weeks.

The Star News welcomes Arrielle Eckhardt and Kevin Rosales as reporting interns this summer.

To answer the burning question, no, I am not planning on going anywhere. I plan to keep kicking around Taylor County for many years to come. Longevity in the newspaper is a dual-edged sword. On one hand you have a lot of institutional knowledge such as remembering why some decision was made two decades ago when its results came through. On the other hand, there is always the risk of getting stale and getting burned out on yet another round of the same song and dance.

Old editors are a lot like vampires in that fresh and eager young reporters and interns provide new blood and inject new ideas and ways of thinking. Since the mantra of any reporter is to question everything, having younger perspectives is a major plus.

To regular readers, Kevin’s name is a familiar one. He has written stories for The Star News while doing a high school school to work experience here in the spring semester.

Kevin was among the graduates of the class of 2022 at Medford Area Senior High School and came on board this summer to see if being a reporter is the right fit for his future career. After taking a week to relax after the end of the school year, he started with us on June 6 and is working part-time.

I consider it a good sign that he came back to work this Monday and look forward to seeing him develop as a writer and reporter. While we share the same language and many of the same rules when it comes to putting words and sentences together, writing a newspaper article and writing for an English class are very different.

My college professors (more likely their teaching assistants since they were the ones doing the heavy lifting) always cringed when journalism students would show up in political science or literature classes. Anyone who has written a college term paper knows where the phrase “if you can’t dazzle from brilliance, baffle them with bull###” comes from. The challenge for everyone involved is that our journalism instructors worked to aggressively strip our writing from any unnecessary fluff. It was common for us to be told a specific length to write to and have points deducted if we ran short or long regardless of how brilliantly written you thought it was.

Ah, the good old days. In addition to Kevin, we are pleased to welcome Arrielle to the paper this summer. Arrielle, whose name I spend time typing over and over every day in the hope of being able to spell it correctly on the first try, is also working part time with us this summer and will be spending most of her time getting stories and photos together for many of our special projects that run throughout the year.

Arrielle is a fourth year English major with an emphasis in professional writing at UW-Platteville and who is originally from Illinois but moved to Medford about two years ago. While I could shamelessly appropriate the introduction story I assigned Arrielle to write on her first day at The Star News, you can read it yourself elsewhere in this week’s paper.

I hope everyone will be welcoming to Kevin and Arrielle this summer and I look forward to guiding them in sharing the stories of the people and places of Taylor County.

***

I just wanted to say thank you for all the people who extended prayers for my sister Sharon. Last week I shared (or perhaps over shared) about her recent heart surgery and complications.

I am happy to give an update that she is off the sedation and is doing much better, she has a long road ahead of her but things are looking much brighter than a week ago.

While I am cynical about many things, when it comes to the power of prayer and positive thoughts, I have seen too many times when it has made a real difference.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.