No free T-shirts. No glitzy gadgets. Just jobs.
By Arturo Garcia
The Unity News

He had no free pens to give away. Or snazzy mugs with a corporate logo. Or glossy brochures touting prize-winning efforts.

All Norm Lewis had with him yesterday was a fold-out banner. And, more importantly, jobs to fill.

Of the more than 200 recruiters at Unity's job fair, the editor of the Skagit Valley-Herald represented a true minority at a convention aimed at minorities: A small-town paper amid the big-city dailies and media chains.

He was sandwiched between the Spokane Spokesman-Review and the Newark Star-Ledger, each at least seven times larger in circulation than his 20,000 paper. Lewis's booth was easy to miss amid the job fair flash. But while the Herald lacks name recognition among the big boys, it has its own strengths, Lewis said.

"A smaller paper always offers that advantage of giving people a broader range of training," said Lewis. "If you go to a larger paper, you've done it all before. If you start off at, say, the Seattle Times, in their internship program, you may get cubbyholed in the business section or the police news section. We give people a broad range of experience."

At papers like the Herald or the Eastside Journal (circulation 25,000), reporters can cover a variety of subjects, according to Journal editor Tom Wolfe.

"You probably work harder at a smaller daily," Wolfe said. "There's more to do. In a sense, there's more opportunity. People don't get pigeonholed as much because if a big story breaks, we call on everybody. Reporters are more likely to have wider-ranging beats."

That's due in part to small staffs: the Herald, for example, has only 25 full-time employees, meaning that even as editor, Lewis wasn't getting a full day off by being at Unity. He had to leave the convention last night to lay out the opinion page and supervise production on today and tomorrow's editions. He also had to fill in for a vacationing copy editor.

"That's the kind of collaborative atmosphere I like," Lewis said. "Sometimes at a big paper, the top editors ... how long has it been since they actually wrote a story or took a picture or laid out a page or made a headline fit? For me, I do that every week."

The Herald also lets employees have a stake in the hiring process. Like most small media outlets, the paper courts recent college graduates, offering them chance to cut their teeth.

"Journalism is the most fun when you know the readers that you're writing for," Lewis said. "I like that."