‘In with the New, Out with the Old’

Let me refresh your memory.

I started working at the Devils Lake Journal in October of 2003 answering an ad that they needed a reporter to write stories and cover events in the community.

I figured I could do that. This was my hometown, I knew the community, and I’d been an English teacher, I could write, what more would I need?

The editor at the time was Gordon Weixel and Kathy Svidal was the publisher. I remember I brought with me some writing I’d done in college, a review of Kushner’s “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” and copies of a newletter I’d published the almost 20 years I’d been a campus minister at Minot State and later Dickinson State universities for the Diocese of Bismarck.

I interviewed with both of them and the next day they hired me.

I learned so much those firs