Wall Street Journal alums to advise Olney Enterprise

A group of Wall Street Journal alumnae has chosen the Olney Enterprise, among other small-town newspapers, as a pilot project for its Local News AdvisoryTeam [LNAT] initiative to bolster local news outlets and prevent more “news deserts” from developing in rural America.

I met with the LNAT planning group via Zoom on Jan. 8 to discuss the needs of our 115-year-old newspaper and how the team could teach me to run the Enterprise more efficiently and recruit more citizen journalists from our community.

We traded ideas for about an hour, and the team asked me to make a list of tasks the Journal alums could perform for the Enterprise and how much time each job would take per week. The group wants to use that information to recruit more alums to help us make this newspaper and our coverage the best it can be.

“We are in the process of organizing pilot projects in which our Local News Advisory Team will provide editing, coaching/mentoring, workshop, and other services to local publications for a couple of months,” James Carberry told me in a follow-up email. “We’re new at this, and our experience with the pilot projects will help us in finalizing our plans to start LNAT. Our relationship with the local publication doesn’t have to end with the project. If we and the publication are in agreement, we can continue to provide services once we launch our team.”

We discussed setting up an internship program that would give our high school students college credit and the chance for internships at bigger publications. We discussed holding workshops to help our citizens learn how to be columnists, editors, proofreaders, and page designers. I said I would ask the community what other ideas they have to improve our coverage, so please think about how we can use this amazing opportunity and email me your ideas at editor@olneyenterprise. com.

The LNAT planning team: Pulitzer Prize and Loeb Lifetime Award winner Joann S. Lublin spent nearly 47 years at the Wall Street Journal before retiring in April 2018 as management news editor. She’s the author of two books about female business executives. She remains a regular WSJ contributor and also freelances for TIME magazine.

Janet Guyon spent 18 years with the Wall Street Journal in the U.S. and Europe, was Fortune’s Europe editor, ran Bloomberg.com, and was a Bloomberg News managing editor. She now works as a staff attorney at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Roy J. Harris Jr. is a 24-year Wall Street Journal veteran, serving as deputy chief of the 14-member Los Angeles bureau. He was senior editor at The Economist’s CFO Magazine, founding editor of CFOworld. com, and the author of “Pulitzer’s Gold: A Century of Public Service Journalism.”

Tom Herman teaches at the University of San Diego’s Communication Studies Department and is a tax columnist for the Wall Street Journal’s wealth management section. He previously taught at Yale University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Jeff Rowe is a former Wall Street Journal staff writer. He also worked at the Associated Press and the Orange County Register, and has led seminars on reporting and writing. He founded Project Business Lift, which coached hundreds of small businesses through the COVID-19 downturn. He created the morning newscast at KDOC-TV and founded Fullerton College’s News Academy.

Jim Carberry started his career with community newspapers, first as a reporter for the Berkeley (California) Gazette and as an investigative reporter for the Riverside (California) Press-Enterprise. He worked at the Wall Street Journal for ten years in Los Angeles and New York, then joined the staff of an international oil industry newsletter as its Asia correspondent, based in Singapore.

Dennis Kneale spent three decades as a journalist and editor at the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNBC, and the Fox Business Network. He directed coverage that won the Wall Street Journal a Pulitzer Prize for National Affairs. He now works as a ghostwriter, content creator, crisis advisor, messaging strategist, media trainer, and contributor to TV/radio/podcasts.