Opinion: Mentoring uplifting and rewarding

One of the most uplifting things to receive, and rewarding things to give, is mentoring. It’s certainly been an important part of my career.

I was in my 30s when I met my first journalism mentor. Bill Rutherford was the page-one editor for the Arkansas Gazette who taught college classes on the side when I was pursuing my undergrad degree at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

He was the best kind of journalism instructor, in large part because he was living it every day. He taught me the basics of good reporting, and he set the bar high with professional standards and solid ethics. He even got me on as a “stringer,” or a freelance reporter, for the Gazette sports department.

Bill would go on to be the last managing editor of “the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi,” just months before the Gazette lost an epic newspaper war to the Arkansas Democrat (now the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette).

I remember the day I called my assignment editor, the groundbreaking sports journalist Wadie Moore, to find out which Friday night football game he wanted me to cover. He told me they were shutting the paper down and escorting everyone out of the building.

Of course, I was but a lowly stringer at that time, but when the Gazette was closed in 1991, some of the best journalists I’ve ever known — Rutherford, Moore, Max Brantley, Ernie Dumas and others — became jobless overnight. Throw in John Brummett and Mara Leveritt and you’ve got my greatest inspirations in those early days of my career.

In my biased opinion, it was a golden age for Arkansas journalism — back when Bill Clinton was ascending to the presidency, the dotcoms were just beginning to grow, and cable was taking immediacy to new depths in a burgeoning 24-hour news cycle.

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By the time I got my first full-time job at a daily, newspapers were changing.

I remember, after Frank Robbins III sold his beloved family owned newspaper (the Log Cabin Democrat) to a corporation that immediately sold it to another corporation, we got a newsroom full of Macs, “pagination” replaced “paste-up” and the newspaper’s bottom line became a little less attached to the community it served.

And, of course, the growth of the internet was changing everything.

The newspaper’s new publisher, Michael Hengel, and I hit it off well. I gave him good reporting and editing, and he gave me room to work and lots of encouragement. He brought me up from reporter to editor and, when the time came, even though he didn’t want to lose me, he helped me get my next job at another newspaper. Now that’s what I call a good mentor.

From there, experience would become my greatest teacher and, as my years in the profession progressed, I became a mentor myself. I did a little adjunct teaching on the side but, mainly, I encouraged the talent I enjoyed in the newsrooms and newspapers I got to run through the years. And after nearly 18 years of newspapering in New Mexico, I can say I’ve been privileged to work with plenty of outstanding journalists committed to the unvarnished truth above all else. And that’s especially heartening for an old-school newspaperman such as myself.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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