Opinion: Citizen Times serves community well, launched an international journalism career
A local newspaper serves as an integral part of a community. It’s the medium through which many collective memories are built, shared and stored. Our Asheville Citizen Times is such a publication. Founded in 1870, it’s long been a news foundation for Asheville and still is today. I hope it will continue.
Earlier this month the Citizen Times newspaper’s executive editor, Karen Chávez, wrote a moving article announcing, clearly with deep sadness, the news that the staff would have to move out of its 85-year-old building March 31. Distressed at learning this, I’ve been remembering how the Citizen Times has been an important influence in my life from childhood.
“Watching in awe for the first time what appeared to an 8-year-old as ‘mighty presses’ in action — huge machines rolling, printing, noisily churning out beautiful newspapers — is a powerful memory from my childhood…” was among some memories I noted in an op-ed “Freedom of the press under attack across US, in Asheville,” published last year.
That was winter 1953-1954 when as a third-grader I first visited the city papers in the distinctive “Asheville Citizen-Times” building “uptown,” as we called Asheville’s “downtown” perched on the flattened hillside. I remember being in awe on meeting the distinguished Mr. D. Hiden Ramsey, then in his last year as longtime editor and vice-president of the papers. He graciously congratulated me on starting my own first newspaper, making copies with carbon paper and delivering it early Saturday mornings around the Montford neighborhood.
Even before I could read, my parents had read newspapers aloud to us children. Growing up here in the 1950s and early 1960s, we enjoyed the morning and the afternoon papers, the Citizen and the Times respectively, and on Sunday the combined Citizen-Times.
When I was in the fourth grade at then Grace (now Ira B. Jones) School, the Citizen-Times published an article about my newspaper enterprises. Reporter Marguerite Alexander described my 9-year-old self: “The ink must flow in the veins … an ardent newspaper woman ...”
What did that mean, I asked my parents. They said it was a figure of speech, suggesting I was born with “printer’s ink” to be a journalist.
I later learned from my maternal grandmother, Sarah “Sadie” Thomas Watters, how she had adventurously gone from North Carolina to New York to study at Columbia Journalism School. Years later I learned that a paternal great-great-uncle, Henry Elliott Colton, had been the young editor of the “Asheville Spectator” newspaper in 1857-58, resigning when the paper started again running slave-ads, and then publishing the first detailed guidebook to WNC, “Mountain Scenery” (1859).
I was hired as ACT’s “Teen Talk” columnist-reporter in my last two years of high school. On Wednesday afternoons after school on the ACT’s second floor, I sat in with the grown-up editors and reporters meeting, typing, smoking, talking around a big conference table. After editing and approval, I typed it out on a big pre-electric typewriter. I was in heaven. I remember the editor, Hal Tribble, penned editorials promoting progressive community action supporting the civil rights movement. The so-called “Woman’s Page” editor of the section covering much community news was a pioneering female journalist, Gertrude Ramsey, with her top reporter and later successor, Mary Ellen Wolcott. They were all journalistic role models.
The Citizen Times was my training ground. I pursued a journalistic career worldwide in all the news media, including as executive editor of 10 weekly Virginia newspapers during which our flagship “Loudoun Times-Mirror” paper won national “Newspaper of Excellence” in the Suburban Newspapers of America. I owe much to my hometown newspaper for all it taught me about journalism, news coverage, the values of community newspapering.
Last week I nostalgically visited the old Asheville Citizen Times building. I admired the specially designed building with the newspaper’s name above the entrance, the mosaic map of WNC in the entryway, looked back toward the area where the “mighty presses” had once been with windows to look down on the printing action, the humming advertising and circulation departments, remembered the newsroom’s various locations on the second and ground floors.
The Asheville Citizen Times, though printed now only six days a week, is still our daily, regional community newspaper. The editors, reporters, photographers, all staff are dedicatedly working to keep this historic Asheville-WNC newspaper going. I for one am deeply appreciative and encourage all their continuing work that is such a great service to our community.
More: Opinion: Press under attack in USA; What happened in Marion, Kansas, can happen anywhere
More: Opinion: 1st Amendment right to freedom of press important everywhere, including Asheville
Elizabeth (Liz) Colton, Ph.D., an Emmy Award-winning journalist who worked in all the news media, and later a diplomat, currently teaches Diplomacy & the Media for UNITAR’s global courses. She serves as board chair of Reporters Without Borders-RSF-USA/North America and also as Diplomat & Journalist in Residence at Warren Wilson College.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: Asheville Citizen Times great service to community since 1870
