Introducing our new Managing Editor

Say hello to Madeline Shannon, our new Managing Editor, who started with us earlier this month.

Madeline’s in charge of determining what news to cover here.  She writes much of it herself, then gets it posted onto our online properties. Further, she’s gotta be Lou Grant, Mary Richards and Murray Slaughter all-in-one; she coaches and cajoles our reporters, stringers and other contributors as they together get articles into shape for publication.  You’ll read more of their combined work here soon.

Her nose for the news began developing quite early; besides writing for her high school paper, at only 17 she was hired by her hometown daily, The Fresno Bee, as a junior reporter. These experiences whetted her appetite for the news and she majored in journalism at California State University, in Fresno, all the while writing for The Collegian there. 

After college she joined Central California Life magazine compiling events and stories into news and calendar items. Her first full-time daily news job was as a local beat reporter at the Daily Courier in Grants Pass, Ore.  That led to a similar position at the Newport News-Times, further north and, more importantly, on the coast of Oregon. Her editor there told me Madeline is “pretty disciplined” and he “never had to babysit her.” Those are among the sweetest words a hiring publisher can hear about a candidate.

She moved to Washington at the start of 2020 to cover the legislature for Washington State Wire and State of Reform, related specialty news sites that focus on government and healthcare issues. That position was eliminated when the current pandemic-shutdown caused many organizations to slash budgets.

Madeline’s got a special interest in clothing and home décor -- she’s completing a Master of Arts in Fashion Journalism later this year.  (Let us know if you discover a local business or craft maker whose story might have an aesthetic angle.) 

Maybe related to that, she arrived here with her own big heavy digital single-lense reflex camera – the kind the pros have -- and she knows how to use it. Get ready for a greater emphasis on photography in JOLT. 

But she won’t be typecast as a fashionista. Water issues, agriculture, crime, politics and the arts are all subjects that Madeline has an interest in covering in the JOLT.  That Lou-Grant-TV reference isn’t completely out of focus here, either.  She plans to bring video reporting to our pages soon, either in front of the camera or behind it.  (Probably both.)

Madeline and I are working together to redesign JOLT into the full-featured local news site you’ll see here soon.  I’ve spent hours with her and can’t tell you what kinds of candidates for whom she likely votes, and that’s probably something she could say about me.  But it’s important for readers to know that their news is being curated and presented by someone with a professionally trained sense of what’s accurate and, as she put it, “hard-nosed.” 

If these were regular times, you’d see Madeline around Thurston County with her notepad and camera. Since that’s not likely for a while, please feel free to contact her the virtual way.