NewspaperAlum

Tracy Thompson, Former Washington Post Staffer, Now Author, Freelance Writer

Photo Credit: Dayna Smith

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Tracy Thompson [See Brief Bio],  former reporter for The Washington Post, recently popped her head in the door at NewspaperAlum to let me know since leaving the Post in 1996 (when her first child was born) she has been busy with magazine freelancing and writing books.

Her freelance work has appeared in a number of publications, including the Washington Post Magazine, O, the Oprah Magazine, Washington Monthly, the New York University Law School Magazine and Civil War Times.

Her next book, ``The New Mind of the South: An Unconventional Portrait for the Twenty-First Century’’ (Simon & Schuster) is due out next March in which she takes a hard look at her native region and explores what it means to be a Southerner in a ``supposedly’’ post-racial era.

Before landing at the Post in 1989, Thompson reported for The Atlanta Constitution from 1981 to 1989, where she covered federal courts. In 1984, she was awarded a fellowship at Yale Law School, where she received an MSL (Master of Studies in Law) degree.

Her dogged shoe leather reporting produced a nationally recognized series for the Constitution in 1987,  entitled “Rural Justice,” which was an investigation into racial disparities in sentencing and the breakdown of the public defender system in a rural Georgia judicial circuit. It was a finalist for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.

Thompson began reporting about the courts and legal affairs for the Post in 1989; in 1992, she wrote a first-person narrative, chronicling her life long battle with depression, including a suicide attempt in 1990, a compelling piece of writing which later became a book, ``The Beast’’,  published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in August 1995.

She is also the author of ``The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children and Struggling with Depression’’, published by HarperCollins in August 2006, a book based on a survey of nearly 400 mothers who have suffered from major depression. The book was written in collaboration with Dr. Sherryl Goodman, professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta.

Other than waiting for the publication of her new book to hit the presses, Thompson has been keeping busy lately editing for a non-profit at Georgetown University; and along with her husband up to her ears in raising two daughters. Speaking of her husband, Thompson’s husband, a NASA engineer, is working on the Dark Energy Space Telescope, a project designed to perform precision measurements of the universe in order to better understand dark energy.

Thompson and her family currently live in the Washington D.C. suburbs. Anyone who might want to contact her, she can be reached at the following email address: [email protected]

-Bill Lucey
[email protected]
June 29, 2012

 

Tim Page, Former Washington Post Music Critic, Opened a New Chapter of His Life at USC

Tim Page and his son John

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Tim Page, former cultural reporter and music critic for The New York Times from 1982 through 1987 and chief classical music critic for The Washington Post from 1995 through 2008, tells me his plate is as full as it has ever been since accepting a buyout.

Initially, Page was invited to help found a program in Arts Journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California as a visiting professor. As it turned out, he liked this new gig so much that he decided to accept a company buyout from The Washington Post and devote his energies to teaching full-time. The Pulitzer winning music critic tells me he is fortunate enough to have been named a tenured full professor last year, and teaches in two departments -- music and journalism.

In addition to his new academic responsibilities, Page has published two books since leaving the Post, ``Parallel Play,’’ a memoir, about growing up in Storrs, Connecticut, his strained relationship with his father, his admission of suffering with panic attacks and his lifelong battle with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, that wasn’t diagnosed until he was 45 years old. The memoir is actually an extension of an article he wrote for The New Yorker in 2007 under the same title.

To mark the 120th birth of Carnegie Hall in 2011, Page also wrote (in collaboration with the staff of Carnegie Hall) ``Carnegie Hall Treasures'',  a sumptuously illustrated hardback, packed with heaps of memorabilia about the historic concert venue in Midtown Manhattan.

Other books by this distinguished music critic and professor, include: "The Glenn Gould Reader"  (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), "Music From The Road: Views and Reviews 1978 - 1992," an anthology of previously published work (Oxford University Press, 1992), "The Unknown Sigrid Undset" (Steerforth, 2001), "Tim Page on Music" (Amadeus Press, 2002), and "What's God Got To Do With It?: Robert Ingersoll on Free Thought, Honest Talk and the Separation of Church and State" (Steerforth Press, 2005).

Page was awarded a Pulitzer for Distinguished Criticism in 1997 for his ``lucid and illuminating music criticism’’ as described by the Pulitzer committee. In addition to working at The New York Times and Washington Post, he was chief music critic at Newsday from 1987 through 1995.

Before his journalism career as a music critic took  root, Page formed a rock band, ``Dover Beach’’ and played cocktail piano at the "Wellington Room," a restaurant in Storrs, Conn in 1973 and 1974.

Settling in nicely to his new tenured position at USC, Page now lives in South Los Angeles.

For those who might want to shoot Tim an email, his contact information can be found on his USC home page.

Bill Lucey
[email protected]
June 29, 2012

JoEllen Murphy Found a ``Great Life'' after Leaving The Washington Post

JoEllen Murphy at the Plein Air Festival last month in Wayne PA, a western suburb of Philadelphia.

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For those who have left the newspaper industry-for whatever reason-JoEllen Murphy has a Breaking News Alert! to pass on: ``There is a great life after the Post!’’

Ms. Murphy was an art director for The Washington Post for 24 years, including stints directing the Weekend and Home sections, before accepting a buyout in 2008.

The former Post staffer informs me since leaving the paper, she has met with a great deal of success as a landscape and portrait painter, winning a number of awards, including Third place in the ``Shades of Pastel’’ national show at Lorton Workhouse Art Center, Lorton, VA in 2011; and Second place in the landscape category at the ``Paint the Town’’ Art Show in Kensington, MD, also in 2011.

``There is a freshness that comes from painting directly from life,” Murphy writes on her website. “I strive to find the beauty of ordinary subjects that we pass by everyday with the vibrancy of pastels, my favorite medium.”

While still at the Post, Murphy enrolled in drawing and pastel workshops, which helped reinforce, she would later recall, ``why I wanted to be an artist.’’

Her select portraits, landscapes, and news of upcoming exhibits, can be found on her website.

Despite her newfound success, Murphy is no stranger to being showered with awards. During her extensive career with the Post, she was the recipient of awards from the Society of Newspaper Design and the Art Director’s Club of New York for both illustration and design.

Murphy received a BFA in medical illustration from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and before landing at the Post, she began her career at the Boston University School of Medicine, where she illustrated medical textbooks for four years.

She lives in Washington DC in American University Park with her husband Les and a red hound dog named Rufus.

-Bill Lucey
[email protected]
June 28, 2012

 

 

``My Semi-Retirement is Hell'' George Vecsey Groans

George Vecsey, right, with his arm around New York writer Ray Robinson, author of “Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in His Time.”
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For those who might wonder what former New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey has been up to since accepting a company buyout in December 2011,  I’m happy to report he is doing well, although he might take issue with such an upbeat description.

The former ``Sports of the Times’’ columnist tells me he spends a good part of his extra free time going to lunch with friends and has already put on 10 pounds, ``some retirement’’, he tells me. ``My semi-retirement is hell. I need a vacation from it’’, Vecsey says.  Speaking of others like him who retired, Vecsey grumbled, `` most of us get our fingerprints changed and move to Boca Raton and change our names.’’

Aside from adjusting to retirement, and putting on a few well deserved extra pounds, Vecsey continues to write on a number of topics of interest to him on  his website, from Mitt Romney and Roger Clemens to the Beatles, the U.S. Postal Service, to Loretta Lynn and Jeremy Lin. He always did have a diverse range. After all, he was a metro reporter and religion writer before beginning his second stint with the Times’ sports department in 1980.  Vecsey originally landed at the Times in 1968 from Newsday in Long Island.

Devoted fans of the Times’ sports pages know that Vesey hasn’t exactly been put out to pasture. He still contributes two sports columns a month, as a contributor.  In fact, in Thursday’s edition, he has a column about Gilad Shilat, the abducted Israeli soldier who is now turning his attention to sports writing.

In addition to his compelling columns (pure poetry) that he pounded out for the Times from 1982 through the end of 2011, Vecsey has written six national best-selling books, including “Stan Musial: An American Life,” published by Ballantine/ESPN Books in May of 2011.

The Jamaica, Queens native lives in Port Washington, Long Island, with his wife, Marianne Graham, an artist and teacher. They have three children and five grandchildren.  Laura Vecsey has been a sports and political columnist in Albany, N.Y., Seattle, Baltimore and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Corinna V. Wilson, an attorney, is vice president for programming at the Pennsylvania Cable Network; and David Vecsey is a copy editor at the New York Times.

-Bill Lucey

[email protected]

June 28, 2012

 

 

Thomas Crampton, former N.Y. Times & International Herald Tribune Correspondent, Now a Social Media Specialist

Award-winning journalist Thomas Crampton who spent 18 years spanning the globe for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, in which he reported from five continents and dozens of countries, dropped me a quick email to let me know he now runs a social media in Asia-Pacific for Ogilvy & Mather where he heads a team encompassing 23 cities in 15 Asian territories that help companies conceive, develop and execute strategies in social media.

Crampton covered the 2004 presidential election for The New York Times; at the International Herald Tribune, he launched the paper’s first blog. Other major reporting assignments covered by this well traveled correspondent include: reporting on the 1997 Asian financial crisis from Thailand, the SARS outbreak from Hong Kong, the civil war in Sudan, rebel fighting in Sri Lanka, Taiwan’s largest earthquake, major hurricanes on U.S. soil, the Cannes Film Festival, including a tour of duty as a Paris-based feature writer on media and technology.

He is co-founder of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club Charity Fund that has raised more than $4 million to support the higher education of disadvantaged children from the Po Leung Kuk.

Crampton earned degrees from the University of Virginia, Trinity College in  Dublin, Ireland and from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris in France.  Among his many talents, this digital media specialist  speaks French, Thai and is currently learning Mandarin Chinese.

Armed with indispensible knowledge and experience to share on the latest in digital technology, Crampton is frequently on the lecture circuit at a number of universities around the world, including Stanford University, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, Keio University in Japan and the National University of Singapore.

-Bill Lucey
[email protected]
June 27, 2012
 

Mark Fitzgerald, Former Editor at Large for Editor & Publisher Magazine, Blazing New Paths

Mark Fitzgerald, editor at large for Editor  & Publisher Magazine for 26 years, was fired from the ``bible of the newspaper industry’’ in 2010 during a tumultuous time he could only describe as the ``10 weirdest months of his life.’’

The Nielsen Co, which had owned E&P since 1999, announced it was closing the 125-year-old magazine in January, 2010. The publication shut down for only two weeks before being bought by Duncan McIntosh Company (Irvine, California), publisher of Boating World, Sea Magazine and The Log newspaper.  Fitzgerald was named the publications’ top editor under its new owners.

 Despite never missing an issue and maintaining a robust website, Fitzgerald and two other colleagues were fired in October, 2010 and replaced by employees from the Duncan McIntosh Co. Fitzgerald told the Maynard Institute which reported on the firing that ``"It was almost like working with a cult with these people. I got no clear explanation of why we got fired.’’

But that is old news; Fitzgerald is now seeding new pastures in other projects.

In May, Fitzgerald tells me he started on a contract basis as publication manager for Inland Press Association, the 127-year-old association of 1,134 member-newspapers that's best known for its extensive training programs for newspaper staffers at all levels and across all print and digital properties.  Specifically, he’s responsible for the monthly The Inlander newspaper as well as digital and print collateral marketing materials.

What excites Fitzgerald the most about this new project is that he will help launch Inland's groundbreaking Executive Program for Innovative Change, a yearlong program for senior newspaper executives that includes intensive multi-day sessions with media leaders such as Richard Gingras, head of news products for Google, and Burt Herman, co-founder of Storify.

``What sets this Inland program apart’’, Fitzgerald explains, `` is that this small group of executives (it's capped at 18) will each come to the program identifying a goal or opportunity for their companies. Over the course of the year they will plan, develop -- and execute -- a game-changing project at their workplace that produces measurable results.’’ Their dedicated website has been launched while Alan D. Mutter, the former editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and San Francisco Chronicle who now teaches media economics and entrepreneurship at UC-Berkeley will serve as its program leader.

Aside from his challenging new venture with Inlander, Fitzgerald has been freelancing for Adweek  and has written an account for the Chicago Jewish Star about being a tourist in Egypt the day the Tahrir Square revolution erupted into violence.

A native of New Jersey, Fitzgerald graduated from Kent State University and began his newspaper career in 1977 at the Passaic Herald-News in northern New Jersey, where he covered politics, the Abscam scandal, and growth and development issues.

-Bill Lucey
[email protected]
June 26, 2012

 

Laid-off From the L.A. Times, Annie Wells Begins Anew

When Annie Wells, a Pulitzer winning photographer for the Los Angeles Times was laid-off in the fall of 2008, it was a painful experience, to be sure, but one like so many others who suffered a similar fate-led her down another road previously never thought possible.

The resilient West Coast baby boomer enrolled in divinity school at Claremont School of Theology in the fall of 2009 and is happy to report she graduated this past May with designs of becoming a hospital or hospice chaplain.  In 2009, she was a chaplain intern at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.

Wells will begin a year-long residency at a hospital in Los Angeles in September. To better prepare for the challenges ahead, she is now in Guadalajara, Mexico learning Spanish.

``I'm 58, a Pulitzer winner, and have never been happier in my life,’’ Wells told me.

The former photojournalist for over 20 years, additionally informs me, since leaving the L.A. Times, she has won preaching and liturgy awards at Claremont School of Theology and was a writing tutor there for two years.

A breast cancer survivor, Wells co-produced a documentary film ``From an Arm’s Length," which is a collection of pictures she took of herself while undergoing treatment. The film is in the production stages with a release date still undetermined.

Wells entered Pulitzer country in 1997, when she was recognized for her gripping photo, capturing a firefighter saving a drowning girl.

During her celebrated journalism career, Wells was the recipient of other notable awards, including the Ruben Salazar Award for Photography, The Robert F Kennedy Journalism Award and the Inter American Press Association Award for Photography.

Wells graduated from the University of California Santa Cruz with a BA degree in Science Writing. Her work is in the permanent collection of The National Museum for Women in the Arts located in Washington, D.C.

Select portraits of her work can be found at her home page.

-Bill Lucey
[email protected]
June 26, 2012

 

When the Daily News Door Shut for Lenore Skenazy, Several More Opened

When Lenore Skenazy was sacked from The New York Daily News in 2006 after 14 years, little did she know that such a swift blow to her ego was arguably the best thing that could have happened to her, at least from a professional standpoint.

While others might have become discouraged, broken-hearted and at war with their former employer, this Chicago native never looked back and simply trudged forward with another chapter in her life.

As Skenazy tells me, if it wasn’t for her abrupt firing, she would have never landed at The New York Sun where she wrote a column: ``Why I let my 9 year old ride the subway alone" ``So in a roundabout way, it's all been good’’ Skenazy said.

It was in this widely talked about column, on April 1, 2008 that she coined the phrase ``Free range kids", a novel piece of writing which triggered heaps of controversy from readers (accusing her of child abuse) in which she took the audacious step of letting her nine year old son take the subway home alone. Up to her ears in fending off disapproval from enraged readers, the controversial column caught the attention of a number of networks, including Fox News, The Today Show and MSNBC.

The column sparked such a fierce debate that it led to her launching a Free-Range Kids blog and eventually a book, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. 

The New York Sun closed in 2008, but Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids blog carries on.

 Skenazy is now host of the  ``World's Worst Mom'', a Reality TV show, by Discovery International TV show, while continuing to twitter away at Free Range Kids.

As if that weren’t enough, Skenazy managed to squeeze in yet another book, this one a trivia book: Who's The Blonde that Married What's-His-Name, a fun twist on short-term memory loss.

A Yale graduate, Skenazy lives in Queens with her husband and two sons, and continues to write a nationally syndicated column for Creators Syndicate, which appears in more than a 100 newspapers.

-Bill Lucey

[email protected]

June 26, 2012

Former Washington Post Reporter Jacqueline Salmon Lands at the Bar

Award-winning journalist Jacqueline Salmon who took a buyout from The Washington Post in 2009,  just popped her head in to say hi and to let me know is she is currently director of public policy communication at the American Bar Association.

During her 22-year career at the Post, Salmon covered nonprofits, religion and real estate. Her brilliant reporting landed her on the front page of the Post on a number of occasions, including her splashes on the Sept. 11 attacks, Hurricane Gustav, the South Asia tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

In 2010-2011, the former Post reporter was a senior officer for Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, D.C., where she wrote speeches and prepared presentations for high-level constituents, including board members, donors, and grantees, corporate and political leaders.

Her ghost-writing project, a book about the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, landed her on the New York Times bestseller list.  Other books written by Salmon include: PLAYGROUND POLITICS, THE CHALLENGING CHILD, THE FOUR-THIRDS SOLUTION and a memoir of Ronald Reagan

From time to time, Salmon shares her extensive reporting experience by speaking at national conferences on a number of issues, including how to deal with the press and covering a major disaster.

-Bill Lucey
[email protected]
June 25, 2012

Jacquelyn Mitchard's New Venture: Editor at New Young Adult Publishing Division

Since retiring from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007, where she was lifestyle columnist with a nationally syndicated weekly column ``Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship’’, Jacquelyn Mitchard  recently began a new job as an editor at a Young Adult only book publisher from F&W Media (publishers of Writers Digest and the Everything books). It's called Merit Press Books, which publishes young adult suspense. And by young adult suspense—Mitchard made it clear she doesn’t men vampires, post-apocalyptic or time travel.

 Having just started in April, Mitchard informs me the first five books have already been snagged, including: LOUDER THAN WORDS by Laurie Plissner, about a girl who loses her ability to speak after an accident that kills her whole family -- until she meets a boy who literally can read her mind. When he leaves her, hoping to speed her progress, she fights for healing and for him, only to learn her family's death was no accident.

Mitchard is author of the best-selling novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, which was the first selection for Oprah's Book Club, on September 17, 1996. Soon after the Oprah appearance, the novel leaped to #1 on New York Times Bestseller for 13 weeks, and remained on the list for 29 weeks overall.

Other works by the American journalist and author include: The Breakdown Lane, Twelve Times Blessed, Christmas, Present, A Theory of Relativity, The Most Wanted, Cage of Stars, No Time to Wave Goodbye, Second Nature - A Love Story, and Still Summer.

In addition to her publishing duties, Mitchard is a faculty fellow at Southern New Hampshire University, and a contributing writer for Parade Magazine and More magazine, among others.

-Bill Lucey

[email protected]

June 25, 2012