'Complete journalists' from Nebraska find homes at The Post
By Chad Lorenz
1998 graduate
The online directory of The Washington Post's employees includes the names of six people who graduated from UNL's journalism school. None of them use the word "I" or "me" in their bios - a rarity at the ego-driven Post.
Of these six biographical sketches, three are written in third-person, two are simply blank and one foregoes pronouns altogether in a single pithy sentence.
That could just be a sign of Midwestern modesty; but it wouldn't be the only characteristic that sets these six alumni from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln apart from their colleagues at The Washington Post.
For one thing, all six work as editors in some capacity at The Post.
Three are copy editors. Two work side by side on the Metro copy desk - Martha Murdock and Chris Hopfensperger. Another (the writer of this story) is on a separate Metro copy desk thatproduces local weekly sections.Two others are assignment editors who command bureaus just outside the District of Columbia. That's Tom Lansworth and Victoria Benning.
The sixth is a former layout whiz who now "edits" job applicants. As director of recruiting, Cheryl Butler helps decide which interns and job candidates will become Post staff members and which ones get the red-pen treatment.
And yet, you wouldn't get the sense from any of them that they are as proud of their own success as they are of the school that helped them reach this point. Without exception, they credit the university's J school for equipping them for careers that ultimately took them to The Post.
"I think Nebraska turns out the most complete journalist," said Hopfensperger, a relatively recent graduate from 1994 who has since worked at newspapers large and small across the country. "Nebraska prepares you to step into a newsroom at almost any level and contribute in any way you're asked to contribute."
That, apparently, is not just a recent trend. Lansworth, who got his journalism degree in 1974, knew even then that the college produced exceptional students.
"At the J school, you're able build a strong resume, but you also got a skills package. The school emphasized that.
"It was assumed that once you got a J school degree, you could go right to work. And that's not always the case with graduates from other schools."
Lansworth would know. Besides having taught journalism at three colleges, he also sees the caliber of students who work at The Post as interns. Lansworth is one of many editors who work one-on-one with these young journalists. He's seen his share of hard workers, as well as those who are not familiar with the concept.
"People from Nebraska know how to work hard, and that still goes a long way." At The Post, Lansworth said, the journalists who stand out are the ones who work the hardest. And that kind of work ethic was encouraged at Nebraska's J school, he said.
Lansworth said there's another type of ethic the J school promotes: "It gave them an understanding of the history of newspapers and a respect for what journalism can do. ...You take those things together - hard work and a respect for the profession - and you're set."
Murdock has been surrounded by reporters and editors from the journalism college during her various jobs and said they were always at the top of their games. "I never met a journalist from Nebraska who was a slacker."
Murdock has compared her news education with that of her husband, a graduate of Northwestern University. She feels she got a more practical education because of the variety of skills Nebraska teaches, such as basics in photojournalism and newspaper design. "They required things of us that other schools don't," Murdock said.
Even Benning, who went through the journalism school as a broadcast major, said she got the preparation she needed to succeed in newspapers. "I credit the J school for a lot of things, because I was able to make a strong transition into print. And I think that speaks to the quality of the college's writing classes."
She acknowledges that it was intimidating to come into The Post, where many writers and editors have an Ivy League education or degrees from schools with reputations for great journalism. "Our program is just as good or better than programs at those schools," Benning said. "I don't feel like I was ever at a disadvantage."
That does not go unnoticed around The Post.
Tom Wilkinson is assistant managing editor for news personnel. He meets every employee who gets hired and keeps up with their work. He's been impressed with the contributions that The Post's Nebraska journalists have made.
"We're interested in the inventiveness and creativity that's possible in the news business ... and you guys have something to do with that," Wilkinson said.
Wilkinson has noticed especially among the Nebraska journalists that they "embrace change and challenge."
He pointed out the four eldest of the group and how they had stepped up to assume major roles at The Post. Butler, for instance, took on the recruiting job despite being unfamiliar with the work. Lansworth became the first editor of a new suburban bureau. Murdock spent years as chief of the Metro copy desk. And Benning made a switch from reporting to become editor of a new local section.
In general, Wilkinson said, journalists from the Midwest bring a special sensibility to an East Coast newsroom like The Post's.
"They're all very well grounded. If there's a reputation of elitism, I suppose, on the East Coast, people from the Midwest are a real antidote to that. They don't settle for a lot of bullshit; in fact, they see right through it. ... And that's our business, that's an important part of what we do."
Those traits have made the six Nebraskans a good fit at The Post, even if, at first, they may have felt a bit different in the Ivy League-dominated newsroom.
"Frankly, I think I was received as a curiosity," Lansworth said.
Since he and Butler were some of the first Nebraskans to enter the ranks at The Post, no doubt they bore the brunt of comments about their unusual origins.
"They thought I was exotic," Butler said with a laugh. " 'A black Nebraskan? Where do you ever see one of those?' "
By the time Hopfensperger had arrived in 2000, being from Nebraska was a certain benefit. The chief of the metro copy desk, Marcia Kramer, is from Illinois and could relate to his Midwestern background, especially his work ethic. "I came in at a definite advantage because of that connection with my boss," he said.
Nebraskans become especially easy and obvious targets during football season. Whether the Huskers are playing well or poorly, certain characters in the newsroom are ready to give Nebraskans a good ribbing. "That's the only time it comes up in the newsroom is when I get shit about being from Nebraska," Hopfensperger said.
Benning, whose brother Damon was a star running back for the Huskers in the '90s, found the football connection was a useful icebreaker when she was interviewing for her job with Post Executive Editor Len Downie, a graduate of Ohio State and a fervent Buckeyes fan.
In various ways and with interesting sidelights, being a Nebraskan with a UNL journalism education has been central to the lives and careers of the six Post news people, and that background played a part in getting them where they are now.
Cheryl Butler
Though Butler started college as a social work major, she quickly changed her focus and earned a bachelor's degree in journalism in winter 1968. She already had been working on the copy desk at the Lincoln Evening Journal and continued there after she graduated.
If she had any doubts about her career choice, they were quickly put to rest. Historic events in 1968 such as the Civil Rights Movement and assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy cemented her interest in news. And the night U.S. astronauts landed on the moon, July 20, 1969, Butler was working as wire editor and helped with the front page stories. It remains the favorite day of her career.
"The world was changing so rapidly," Butler said. "It certainly made journalism exciting for me."
Butler stayed with the Evening Journal for more than four years while her new husband worked to finish his degree. She rotated into various copy editing, page layout and news editing duties, and spent two years doing nearly every job for a new Saturday features section the newspaper started.
When her husband took a job in St. Paul, Minn., Butler found work at the St. Paul Dispatch as a copy editor in April 1972.
In February 1981, she got a job at The Post, working as a makeup editor during the newspaper's days of cold type. She circulated around the composing room, overseeing the work of the printers who were pasting columns of type onto cardboard flats and double-checking the layouts of her upstairs colleagues.
The Post, naturally, was unlike any work environment she had been in before. She said her first instinct was to be frightened by it size. She was especially in awe of all the talent and experience of her co-workers, even though her past jobs had put her in contact with other talented journalists.
"There was a higher bar that they were reaching for than at other papers."
She saw that talent in action shortly after she was hired when, on March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton Hotel in D.C. "It was just amazing to watch as it was covered."
Butler also remembers a year later, on Jan. 13, 1982, when Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the Potomac River after a failed takeoff from Washington National Airport. Seventy-eight people were killed, including four motorists on a bridge struck by the plane. Half an hour later, a subway car derailed inside the city, killing three and further worsening a transportation crisis on a snow-filled afternoon. Again, she watched as The Post mobilized its talented and abundant news staff to cover the events.
After a year-and-a-half as makeup editor, Butler was promoted to a job on the news desk, laying out pages for the Metro section. Five years later she was named deputy news editor, which meant she helped decide story play and appearance of news pages.
Throughout those years as a layout editor, Butler saw the newsroom's technology change from using "dinosaur" computer terminals and messy paste-up techniques to a smoother, more efficient system of pagination. The composing room began to handle fewer and fewer pages as The Post gradually streamlined its output process. On March 31, 2001, the composing room shut down. "All of a sudden it was an electronic job instead of a manual job."
Shortly thereafter, Butler left the news desk and filled a vacancy as director of recruiting, a job she said loves because of the people she meets. She especially enjoys her contact with the college students she meets while hunting for interns. "Young people have that energy, and being around that re-energizes you."
Her duty takes her to college campuses around the United States and involves reviewing hundreds of applications every fall for the newspaper's 20-odd summer internships. Her recruiting work also involves traveling to journalism conventions of groups like the National Association for Black Journalists.
Though she's been in the job only two years, she's not totally satisfied with her progress on one of her major goals: to increase newsroom diversity. It's an ongoing effort, she said, that was hampered much of the last two years during The Post's hiring slowdown, when only the most essential positions were filled. Fewer hires overall meant fewer minorities entering the newsroom.
Though Butler said she's disappointed, she knows she has a few more years to do better. "I guess I've never totally satisfied with everything I do."
That doesn't mean she's not relished several high points in her career. Just as the events of the '60s lighted a fire in her for news, her proudest moments were working in the heat of the big news events.
During the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton in 1998, Butler, then deputy news editor, got to be a major player in the news and design decisions. "I felt good that my opinions were important."
The fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the 1993 skirmish in Somalia - Butler always got a piece of the action.
She also got a biennial thrill out of working on election nights. "That's when you really see The Post at work, because politics is so important here. It always looks like a convention floor."
Her passion for those frantic news days became especially poignant at a time she was no longer directly involved with them. "The day I felt the least useful was on 9/11," Butler said. With their own city under attack, The Washington Post staff solemnly went to work on that grim day doing what they felt was their duty as journalists.
"It was the only day I missed being on the news desk."
But after passion and duty, another pleasure comes into play: honor. Butler said her proudest moment came last year when she was one of seven alumni invited to the University of Nebraska's Masters Week. Butler said she was flattered to be chosen from thousands of alumni as having been successful in her field. The people named as masters spend the week speaking to professors in their field and talking about their profession to students in related class.
"It was important to me to give back [to the university], but the honor itself, it's just huge."
Tom Lansworth
Lansworth's winding journey to the Post was slightly less conventional, though it also began at the Lincoln Evening Journal.
He started as a copy editor there in 1973, shortly before he earned the last credit for his journalism degree. He later did some reporting from the Unicameral and covered local government for the Journal before succumbing to the lure of law school in 1977.
Teaching was his next interest, and he joined the faculty of Drake College in Des Moines in 1984, lecturing for media law and editing classes.
That year he also met an up-and-coming reporter at the Des Moines Register, Jane Norman. They married, and when Norman got a job in the Register's Washington bureau in summer 1988, Lansworth came to D.C. and started teaching at University of Maryland - media law and editing, naturally.
By then Lansworth missed the newsroom, so he sent a blind letter to The Post's then-managing editor, Downie, and got a form rejection letter. Exactly one day later, he got a phone call from an editor on the foreign desk who was looking for a part-time copy editor and wanted a look at Lansworth.
The remainder of 1988 through most of 1989 was a busy time for the foreign desk: the Pan-Am bombing on Dec. 21, 1988, Tiananmen Square and the deepening cracks in the Communist Bloc. The Berlin Wall was next.
Those conditions, Lansworth said, are perhaps what prompted the copy chief to hire him full-time. "In editing," he said, "people's perceptions of you are based on seeing the work you do."
Considering Lansworth's last newsroom job had been at the Lincoln Evening Journal, he understood his new job was several levels more challenging than what he was used to. And the intensity of the news coverage at that time, especially in June 1989 with late-night dispatches coming from the Far East, put Lansworth to the test. "If I didn't know my way around a newsroom from my experience in the J school, it would have been a lot tougher to deal with the deadline pressure on stories from China."
Before the end of the year, Lansworth's reputation as a capable copy editor had spread, and he was sought by the National copy desk, which handles what some consider the paper's most important stories. By 1995, Lansworth was named copy chief of that desk.
One luxury at The Post, Lansworth said, is that nearly all the newspaper's content is staff written, so it's a simple matter to get a question answered or to clear up an editing problem. And, much to his surprise, Lansworth said The Post's big-name reporters have always been the most pleasant ones to work with.
He also has been impressed by the way the paper is run: as a family business. As a result, he said, it's a place where commitment and relationships are important. It's not unusual to see Don Graham, former publisher and Post board chairman, strolling through the newsroom, where he appears to know just about everyone.
"I don't ever remember being introduced to him, but he knew who I was," Lansworth said of an early encounter when Graham was publisher.
Lansworth has seen how The Post has broadened its focus from being almost solely concerned with politics and national and foreign news to also establishing solid coverage of the growing metro area. It's been a serious initiative at the newspaper for the past five to six years, he said, one that's widely seen in the industry as among the most successful of such efforts.
In fact, the company's dedication to expanding local coverage led Lansworth to another job change, when he was named in 1998 as editor of the Southern Maryland Extra.
The Extra, a semiweekly tabloid, was one of three experiments at that time to deliver more community news to readers in the outer suburbs of Washington. The sections have been so successful, The Post has created 11 Extras that cover every county in its readership area, from Anne Arundel, Md., to the rural reaches of northern Virginia.
The change came at the right time for Lansworth, who had begun to wear out under the relentless pressure and complexities of leading the national copy desk, where various levels of personalities and opinions come into play. "You get tired of being in the middle of the spotlight as far as a working environment," he said.
At the Southern Maryland bureau, in the small town of La Plata, Lansworth relishes his independence. He directs a staff of six reporters and two aides who cover the governments of three counties, their schools, their people and small community living.
"In many ways," Lansworth said, "it's like running a hometown newspaper, but with The Post's name and The Post's prestige - and The Post's checkbook - behind you."
Now in his fourth year, Lansworth said he enjoyed interactions with the real people and readers of the community, who seem more connected with the news of the Extra than with The Post's coverage of politics and distant events.
"I refocused my own perspective on the world in terms of what's important."
It reflected a change in his own life as Lansworth, now with two children, became more concerned with matters that affect a family: news about schools, housing, crime and taxes.
Comfortable in his current job - "I could do it until the end comes" - he has no plans for future career moves. Lansworth said he would be very reluctant to leave The Post, a newspaper that has been good to him for the last 14 years.
"There's a commitment that builds over the years, in both directions."
Martha Murdock
In the jobs leading up to her position at The Post, Murdock never felt too far from her home state because "there's always been Nebraskans or Nebraska connections surrounding me everywhere I went," she said.
After graduating in 1982, Murdock started at the Wichita Eagle-Beacon, where then-news editor Ray Wilkerson was always scouting for Nebraska's best and brightest journalists - and got plenty of them. Wilkerson later left for the Dallas Times Herald and extended the Nebraska pipeline even farther south. In 1984, Murdock followed along.
In Dallas, she met Nebraskans like Ron Ruggles, who had graduated from UNL a handful of years before she did. Another colleague, Amy Lenzen, was a familiar face from Murdock's days at the Daily Nebraskan. "She was somebody I looked up to," Murdock said, "and it turned out she was in Dallas when I was there." John Goecke, who had helped Murdock redesign the Daily Nebraskan when Murdock was editor in chief, also joined the Times Herald staff.
Even when Murdock went as far as Florida in 1986 to work at The Miami Herald, a Nebraska presence had preceded her. Alfred "Bud" Pagel had been a writer at The Herald for years, and all the veterans knew him. Murdock, however, had only heard of Pagel through her father, a copy editor at the Omaha World-Herald. It wasn't long before she sought out the man behind the myth during subsequent trips home. (Pagel later left his mark at the journalism college where he continues to teach as an emeritus professor.)
Also in Miami, Murdock befriended Nebraskans Wes Albers and Mary Behne, UNL journalism graduates in 1975 and 1984, respectively. Behne, in fact, became such a close friend she was in Murdock's wedding.
When Murdock reached The Post in 1990, she knew she had natural ties in Lansworth and in Butler, who was a fellow Omaha Central High School alumna, but she also knew plenty of Post colleagues who had arrived from Miami. "That made me feel at home quickly because there were faces that I'd known from other places I'd been," Murdock said.
She said her Nebraska personality also helped make those easy transitions from newsroom to newsroom. As a Nebraskan, she said she always found it easy to be friendly with co-workers, and perhaps that's why she felt she'd always been treated well in every job.
"When you go home, you certainly feel that. People are relaxed; it's a slower pace," she said. "People are more friendly and more open."
She was especially surprised to find people at The Post so friendly and helpful, even among the newspaper's bigger personalities. She remembers one day working on the metro copy desk when she was editing an investigative project on a D.C. prison complex. Bob Woodward was assistant managing editor on duty for the day and stopped by the copy desk to check in on Murdock. "He introduced himself and said, 'Hi, I'm Bob Woodward.' And I shook his hand and thought, 'Uh, yeah, I know,' " Murdock said, mocking a shy, nervous laugh. "I think he was making me feel a little star struck."
Murdock's work during first four years at The Post was apparently impressive - she was tapped to be Metro copy desk chief in 1994. But it's simply the nature of the work that keep her satisfied with the job.
In copy editing, she said, "You leave every night with a sense of accomplishment." Often she's felt that she's pushed the envelope or learned something new after navigating a night of deadlines. "I was always into the adrenaline rush of working night side. That's something I've missed when I've worked on the day side."
Of course, she said, copy editors everywhere typically have the same complaint about their job: the way they are undervalued. She credits The Post for understanding that and "trying to make us feel part of the bigger picture." But most managers, even at The Post, she said, don't know how it feels to be down in the trenches or what it's like to deal with the various complexities that come with managing a copy desk staff.
"They feel gratitude, but they don't express it in a way that hits home for copy editors. ... I wish there was a greater understanding of what copy editors do in terms of the big picture."
A copy editor may put in a hard night of work and make a great catch, but that effort tends to go unnoticed. But without a copy editor, she said, a story just doesn't have the same polish. Murdock said she feels lucky that the assistant managing editor for metro, Jo-Ann Armao, "makes sure we know she values what we do."
That said, Murdock has no plans to leave The Post, partly because she has started her own family here. She stepped down as metro copy chief in 1999 so she could have a child, and she returned as a part-timer on the desk. Her husband, Tom Lent, has been a copy chief of USA Weekend since 1992.
"It would take something rather cataclysmic to uproot us now."
Victoria Benning
In the merry-go-round ride of newspapers, it may not be surprising that Benning arrived at The Washington Post at the calling of the same man who helped put her career into full gear.
Benning worked two years after graduation in 1985 at the Fremont Tribune, where she had covered pretty much every beat. The Tribune was part of the Gannett Co. newspaper chain, as was the nearby Des Moines Register. Benning seized on the many opportunities for movement within the company to get herself to the respected Register.
There she met Richard Paxson, who was then metro editor. Paxson, who became a close friend of Lansworth, was a Missouri native who grew up in Kansas and graduated from KU's journalism school; his first newspaper job was at the Lincoln Evening Journal.
Paxson took an interest in Benning and gave her an encouraging boost.
"I'll never forget when Richard Paxson gave me my first A1, above-the-fold story," Benning said, recalling a night she was working a night shift when news broke of an NCAA infraction scandal at the University of Iowa. "He came up to me and said, 'How'd you like to work on an A1 story today?' "
Benning then circulated through beats covering local government, the statehouse and education at The Register over four years. By the end of her service, Paxson had moved on. Benning was also ready to do so.
The Omaha World-Herald had sought the Omaha native since her graduation from UNL, and she took a job there in 1991 covering the presidential bids of Bob Kerrey and Tom Harkin. During a campaign stop in Des Moines, she met a reporter from The Boston Globe who was staying across the hall from her in the Marriott. He had picked up a copy of the World-Herald that morning; he was impressed by a story with Benning's byline and wanted to know about her sources. He passed her name on to Globe editors who were looking for some new talent.
"I didn't even finish the year there [at the World-Herald]," Benning said. "They were very understanding about it."
In three years, her beats at The Boston Globe included education, state and local government, and health and human services.
Her next move took her to the Detroit Free Press in September 1994. Paxson had reached The Post by that time and called to coax her to Washington. Benning wanted to stay put for the time being. But when the newsroom employees of the Free Press went on strike the next year, Benning was ready to take The Post up on Paxson's offer.
Having spent winters in the deep freezes of Nebraska, Iowa, Michigan and Massachusetts, Benning was pleased to be headed to Washington's warm climate. Her arrival in December 1995 was ill-timed, however, as it came shortly before Washington's legendary blizzard that shut down the federal government and indeed much of the city. It was the first time that snow prevented Benning from reporting to work.
Her welcome in the newsroom, though, was not at all cold. "It was actually a lot more of a friendly place than I expected. It wasn't the snake pit I was told it was when I was at other papers."
Benning started at The Post covering education in the Virginia suburbs for five years. She quickly learned how satisfying it was to be "working at a paper where you're read around the world." In one instance, a story she wrote about a cheating incident at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., prompted at least a dozen calls and e-mails from readers as far away as California.
Before experiencing that type of success, coming to The Post was intimidating, to be sure. "I already had quite a bit of experience," Benning said, "but it was hard to get used to The Post style - to learn about what makes a Post story. And I was more heavily edited than I'd ever been. ... At first you feel totally incompetent."
But Benning proved she was competent and before long was ready for her next role.
Up until that time, Paxson was at the forefront of metro's expanding coverage into Washington's suburbs. It was his mission to establish weekly Extras in every county around the city. Sadly, Paxson did not get to watch his vision take its complete shape. He died of cancer Dec. 11, 2000, as the plans for the newest Extras were plotted.
And when the Alexandria Arlington Extra was hatched in February 2001, Benning was asked to be its editor, no doubt just as Paxson would have wanted.
"I remembered thinking, 'Wow, what would Richard think?'"
Besides Paxson, Benning said she is grateful to many other journalists who inspired and encouraged her throughout her career. Tom Grein, former Fremont Tribune managing editor, for instance, gave Benning her first internship, even though her background was in broadcasting. And Tribune publisher Sarah Bentley was one of the first female journalists whom Benning looked up to. So was Pat Waters, who succeeded Grein as managing editor at the Tribune. Geneva Overholser, former editor at The Des Moines Register, was another one.
As certainly as these figures motivated her toward success she never imagined, she said she believes other graduates from UNL's journalism college should aim just as high. "I think students at Nebraska set their expectations too low."
Nonetheless, she said she thrived under the guidance of good instructors such as professors Thomas Spann, Pete Mayeux and Larry Walklin.
It was an experience she nearly missed because, as a senior at Central High School, she had her heart set on attending Northwestern University or Missouri, but those schools' high tuitions were out of reach. She was advised to try the University of Nebraska for one year.
"I just had such a great time, I wanted to stay," Benning said. "... I still look back on those years, and that was the best time of my life."
Chris Hopfensperger
Like many new journalism college graduates, Hopfensperger left the university in December 1993 thirsty for a taste of professional newspapers.
He first took internships at the Chicago Tribune and The Des Moines Register before setting out to find a newsroom that would be the first major stop on his career.
But it was not to be just yet.
With a skimpy job market in newspapers and an economy still in recession, Hopfensperger settled for taking classified ad orders at the Bellevue Leader and working nights at UPS loading trucks. He thought it was an interesting irony that one of the Leader's ace writers at the time had been a college friend who dropped out of the journalism school.
"Kids who graduated in the late '90s had no appreciation for what you had to do to get a job at that point," Hopfensperger said.
Nearly a year after graduation, things began to turn around. The Idaho Statesman called and invited Hopfensperger to come to Boise for a tryout. Hopfensperger's connection to The Statesman was an old Daily Nebraskan colleague, Mike Deeds, who had been arts and entertainment editor at the college newspaper.
Hopfensperger said he viewed The Statesman, where he was hired as a copy editor and page designer, as a good start, one he would make into what Einstein referred to as a "lighthouse job."
"It let me focus on being a journalist and what I wanted to do as a journalist," Hopfensperger said.
Hopfensperger often took the place of his supervisor as news editor when she was away, ultimately taking her place while she was on maternity leave. He got to use his own news judgment and decide on the play of stories and general look of A1.
Some days, that was harder than others. The Statesman's executive editor, John Costa, was known for late-night changes to the front page. "He would call after watching the first 10 minutes of the local TV news and say, 'Tear it up,' " Hopfensperger said. Sometimes Hopfensperger had to stand up and convince Costa that it was just wasn't a good idea. It was a valuable lesson to the young editor: "You had to stick up for yourself and have faith in what you were doing."
Ready for new challenges, Hopfensperger left Idaho for a job at the St. Petersburg Times heeding the advice of Costa and UNL editing professor Daryl Frazell, both former Times staffers.
It didn't take long for Hopfensperger to learn it was a job he really wanted. When visiting St. Petersburg for a tryout, he stopped in his hotel lobby to pick up a copy of the Times' competition, The Tampa Tribune. "I remember I was riding back up the elevator flipping through The Tribune, just sort of laughing at it ... and a woman next to me said, 'You know, you really should get the Times, it's a much better paper.' "
Hopfensperger was impressed that the newspaper had the love and respect of the community it served, considering that most newspapers aren't regarded that way. "You feel like you are a steward of that - that you're part of a role in that community."
Hopfensperger was hired to edit copy and design pages for the newspaper's A-section. He learned a whole new approach to design from two colleagues, Chris Lavin and Ron Brackett. "They're the ones who taught me to take the whole world and put it on a page."
After nearly two years in St. Petersburg, including almost a year working on the Times' Weekend desk, Hopfensperger did the math: He had spent more than four years in cities far from his girlfriend, Darragh Johnson, a reporter he'd met in 1994 while an intern in Des Moines. The two were ready for a reunion.
Johnson was a reporter at The Sacramento Bee at the time, and Hopfensperger managed to get a copy editing job there. Nine months into his job at The Bee, Hopfensperger got a phone call from Johnson, who was across the country interviewing for a job at The Washington Post. The Post seemed interested in hiring her, and the newspaper was exactly what she wanted in her next job.
"I got off the phone and just put my head in my hands for a minute, and I thought, 'O.K., we're going back to dating long distance again.' "
Half an hour later, the phone rang again. Kramer, The Post's Metro copy chief, had heard about Hopfensperger through a contact at The Sacramento Bee and wanted him to try out for a Post copy desk position. Kramer said she knew nothing of Johnson's interviewing at the newspaper that very day.
So the couple moved to Washington and started jobs at The Post within months of each other. Hopfensperger said his early experience was overwhelming, especially as his desk was smack in the middle of a newsroom that looked exactly as it did in "All the President's Men."
And the paper has lived up to the hype. He still finds it a mark of the newspaper's greatness, for example, that at one point it had 100 reporters working on some angle to the sniper story in October (he counted bylines). "Where else can you throw that many people at a story and still have people left to put out a newspaper," Hopfensperger said.
For sure, his work at The Post is much different from the days in Boise and St. Petersburg when he was calling the shots on front page design and headlines. "I'm involved on a much smaller scale, but I'm so much closer the story."
Hopfensperger said he got a lot of satisfaction from working on The Post's award-winning journalism projects that make a deep impact on the city and in people's lives. The Post's 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting was awarded for a series about cases of neglect and 229 deaths in the D.C. child protective care system. In 2000, The Post won a Public Service Pulitzer for disclosing neglect and abuse within the city's group home system for the mentally retarded.
"When you realize that The Post is causing things to change, making a difference in people's lives, that's more of a highlight than a big news night," Hopfensperger said.
Hopfensperger's memories of Nebraska, and especially of his college days, will always involve the close friends and talented journalists he knew while toiling away at the Daily Nebraskan, where he served as editor in chief.
He remembers a late-night conversation with cartoonist Brian Shellito over beers at O'Rourke's. The two fantasized about bringing all the DN's best journalists back to Lincoln to take over the Journal Star and turn it into a nationally recognized newspaper. They dreamed of harnessing talents such as Deeds, Jane Hirt, Curt Wagner, Lisa Donovan, Eric Pfanner, Jeff Zeleny, Dionne Searcy and Mike Lewis.
"You get those people and put them into the same newsroom," Hopfensperger said, "it would be amazing."
Nebraska ties
Despite making the Washington area their home, in Butler's case for 21 years, all six alumni say that their Nebraska origins are ingrained in them-in their memories, in their personalities.
"You always have a sense of belonging to some place," Lansworth said, "and for me, Nebraska is that place."
Lansworth speaks fondly of the sheer beauty of the landscape and the impression it made on him. He had relatives elsewhere in the state and spent time in the countryside, where he remembers being surrounded by the wide open spaces, "the sky you can see forever."
Lansworth misses those scenes, because, he said, there's a beauty to the "huge expanses of land and sky, one which we fail to recognize until we get somewhere else."
Butler has noticed how these visions and memories can creep into the kind of person we become.
"There's just something about being surrounded by a field of grain - it's about what's not there," she said. "I think that establishes a type of character different from other parts of the country that are more urban."
It factors into the way Nebraskans are hard workers, the way they're family oriented, the way they respect a rural and natural landscape. "It's culturally different from the East Coast," she said.
It factors into Murdock's memories, too: "All the good times and traumas of childhood were set in Nebraska."
And those same Nebraska images - just as Willa Cather's works describe them - made a deep impression on Murdock, even though she was a city girl. "Even when you get just outside of Omaha, the land just opens up." Murdock remembers the long drives from Omaha to Colorado - how fascinating it was to see that landscape change as you move west.
"You just can't get it back here, that flat landscape, where the sky almost looks bigger than the land. ... I feel like I'm a Nebraskan because I can understand that, and I don't think someone from here could feel it the way I do."
Editor's note:
Chad Lorenz, who wrote this story about his fellow Nebraskans at The Post, graduated from UNL in December 1998 and joined The Post in February 1999. He works on a metro copy desk for Extras, the 11 local tabloids that cover the D.C. suburbs. When he started at The Post, the newspaper had just begun publishing its fourth Extra, and Lorenz says he has enjoyed being involved with the development of these special publications.
The Extras run weekly or bi-weekly. Thus, Lorenz says, "We really have only two deadlines a week, which creates a really ideal condition for editing. It's nice to be able to take our time, especially with really long features, our cover stories. I also like the variety in the content. Sometimes I edit hard news, sometimes community features, sometimes a depth news story. Other times, it's local sports or restaurant and theater reviews. So each day of work is a real mixed bag."
He adds, "All in all, I'm content on this desk because, besides the fulfilling work, I also have a nice schedule - only two late nights a week, and the work week is only four days, albeit long ones. And there are occasional opportunities to work on other desks; I've put in time in foreign and the daily metro desk, for instance."
