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Originally Posted by SleazyDream
11. Talk about all the newspapers you've worked for.
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When I lived in Wisconsin I worked for two dailies - first, the Oshkosh Northwestern, where I worked for a year covering various things, getting my feet wet, meeting people, etc., etc. The big deal in Oshkosh every summer is the EAA Airventure, which is the biggest airshow in the world next to the Paris air show. For a week every summer a town of 60,000 turns into a town of 200,000. The tiny-ass airport in Oshkosh is the busiest in the world after I think O'Hare and George Bush. Planes fly in from all over the world and they park them in acres and acres of fields. Quite a spectacle. Covering EAA that summer was a hell of a lot of work, but it was also an experience I'll never forget. Among other things, including a WWII fighter bursting into flames moments after takeoff and crashing, the owner of SC Johnson built an exact replica of Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose and flew it into Oshkosh that summer. I interviewed him. Pretty cool shit.
So then I worked for the Appleton Post Crescent. Unlike Oshkosh, Appleton is a pretty cool town. Heart of the Fox River Valley and all. This is actually one of the bigger and more respected papers in Wisconsin, at least until Gannett took it over. Anyway, this was 2000. I was an avid political buff back then (six years of Bush has made me a jaded prick) and that summer, of course, was the height of the Bush/Gore race for the presidency. Somehow I kissed the right ass and got myself assigned to covering much of the campaign. Wisconsin was a swing state, so one or both of those fools was stopping in every other week. I covered most of their stops and slyly inserted my liberal bias in most of the stories I wrote.
Just kidding. it was pretty cool, I got access I really never dreamed of and my byline on the front page quite a bit. And despite the amount of post-work celebrating I did that summer, it's one I'll never forget.
Finally, in college I was the managing editor of our school newspaper, the real go-getter that I was. Well, my senior year after working my way up through the ranks I figured it was my turn to make some changes. I started with our logo. Wanting to make a splash and catch a lot of eyeballs I decided to abandon the standby black, block font and use my Photoshop skills to make the color scheme a rainbow and turn the block letters into something akin to a marquee scroll. I succeeded in making an eye-catching logo. Everyone noticed. Of course, they all thought we were a LGBT pub. In hindsight, I should have stayed with black.