Experience with summer intern got me thinking of days at EKU

When you are an editor at a college newspaper, you have staff writers that turn in all kinds of stories with varying levels of quality. Some prove to be memorable and not for good reason…LOL.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

You usually had one or two staff writers, who were pretty darn good and you didn’t have to do much, if anything, to their stories. Then you had some that reading their stories made your head hurt.

One story in particular that stood out was a feature story a staff writer wrote about a dancer at a new “Gentlemen’s Club” shall we say that had opened in Richmond. The subject of the story wasn’t as memorable as all of the grammatical errors that were in it though.

Staff writers would periodically also turn in some of these same stories that they wrote for the paper as part of classroom assignments. It wasn’t uncommon for professors to come to some of us editors to make sure these staff writers were turning in their original version of the story rather than our edited version.

I remember one of my favorite professors, Liz Hansen, coming up to me one day in The Eastern Progress office asking me to take a look at the dancer story to see if it was the same thing that originally got turned into me.

After glancing through Liz’s marked up copy of the story, I looked at her and said, “based upon the sheer volume of red ink, I have no doubt.” We both had a pretty good laugh.

Almost all of our college staff writers were journalism majors, but, some of them wrote better than others.

I found myself thinking about my old staff writers from college earlier this summer as Leeann Fragosa joined us here at the News Journal for a summer internship.

Although she is an early education major, who had never taken a journalism class a day in her life, she was writing better stories on day one than some of the journalism majors that I had as staff writers back in college.

Leeann recently completed her internship. She has been a joy to work with and get to know over the last 10 weeks.

As I told her on her last day, she could do this for a living if the whole teaching thing doesn’t work out.

I wish her well on all of her future endeavors.

Now to touch on another topic before I conclude this column.

We now have the Whitley County Fair behind us, and coming up in a few short weeks will be NIBROC in Corbin.

I typically enjoy some of the big named musical acts that NIBROC has booked in the past, such as Rick Springfield, Styx and .38 Special. While none of those big names are lined up for this year’s festival, Bruce Carpenter has some acts with local ties that are worth checking out.

County Wide is a popular local group, which always puts on a good show. These guys don’t disappoint.

A slightly lesser known local group, Paint Creek, is another local band that is performing this year at NIBROC. It includes brothers Eric and Alec Poore of Williamsburg, along with their close friends Blake Phelps, Connor Wilson and Justin Conn. Paint Creek is a band that I enjoy listening to about as much as County Wide. If you haven’t heard either of these two bands, then you need to check them out.

Another act with local ties that is slated to perform this year at NIBROC is

Tim & Taylor. This husband and wife duo features Corbin native Tim Gore. I haven’t heard them, but will probably try to check them out.

Look elsewhere in this week’s paper for more information about Tim & Taylor.