Career Path Of A Publisher And Art Director At Alamosa Citizen

I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, majoring in journalism and graphic communication. It was important for me to gain experience in college, so I worked at the Daily newspaper, then called Mustang Daily. It's now an online site, but at the time, it was a daily print newspaper. I worked my way up to become one of the editors.

That experience was invaluable, allowing me to get hands-on with the work I wanted to pursue later. As part of my college requirements, I completed an internship at the Bakersfield Californian, which was a fairly large newspaper in the valley then. It was a union paper and paid well for an intern.

I worked in the futures department, writing stories about various aspects of life in Bakersfield. I grew up in San Luis Obispo and had always thought of Bakersfield as a bit "icky," but I grew to really like it after working there. A good lesson I learned is that if you immerse yourself in a community and work there, you'll begin to appreciate it.

After that, I worked at the Telegram Tribune, now just the Tribune. I started as a copy editor and moved up to assistant city editor. Then I left for the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, California, where I was a copy editor, page one designer, and features designer.

I eventually became the editorial design director for several years. This was right when Knight Ritter imploded and sold the newspaper. Journalism started to fall apart as the .com era took over, newspapers began being owned by hedge funds, and staff shedding became common.

At that point, I was also having a baby, so I felt it was the perfect time to try something new. I started freelancing and set up my own company, my own LLC, which I still operate today. My husband was also a journalist and changing jobs frequently.

We moved from Walnut Creek to Palm Springs, then to Denver, where we worked for the city's 2008 convention host committee, helping prepare for the Democratic National Convention. I handled marketing and communications for that. We then moved to El Paso, Texas, for seven years, where I gained some great clients.

I worked with the El Paso Opera and the Paso Del Norte Health Foundation, a large, multi-binational, bilingual foundation that funds health programs in Juarez and El Paso. They grant about $10 million annually, and I assisted them with their marketing.

Finally, we moved to my husband's hometown, Tiny Eatsy Bey, little Alamosa, Colorado, near the New Mexico border. We're close to Taos and Santa Fe. We felt our town wasn't being well-served by the local paper, so we started our own.

Now we run alamosa citizen.com, an all-digital local news source. We've been doing that for about three years. I still do some graphic design for clients, but I am also the publisher and art director of alamosa citizen.com, which recently won nine awards from the Colorado Press Association.