Four years as a staff reporter for an award-winning historic regional daily newspaper, generating story ideas and writing on subjects from health to Latino festivals, plus pulling the interesting parts from two weekly county government sessions and contributing to extensive special sections and series with the rest of the staff, have honed my organizational skills and given me a keen eye for what is essential in a text and what is not. Not only did I write under strict deadline pressure in a small newsroom, where any morning I might be called upon to rush out to a breaking news story, I also sketched the layout of two regular pages a week, one in arts and one in higher education, generated or secured text and art for those pages, and edited them. In only my second year as a reporter, moreover, my writing secured me two coveted first place awards in a peer-reviewed statewide competition, for investigative and government reporting. I also received first and second place awards in