I grew up in Central Illinois in a town called White Heath, which made us (yes!) White Heathens. I went to high school at University Laboratory High School on the campus of the University of Illinois. I took a year off before officially starting college and took classes at the U of I, which is when I learned ikebana and how to tap dance and became an EMT.
Then I officially entered the U of I and majored in news-editorial journalism at the College of Communications. Immediately after I graduated in Spring 2002, I was picked for a Dow Jones News Editing Internship and spent the summer as a copy editor in Duluth, Minn., at the Duluth News Tribune. They were very lovely.
After my summer internship, I started grad school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. My “concentration” was in New Media, which I think they now call Interactive Storytelling. I learned a lot while reporting from Medill’s downtown Chicago newsroom.
I spent my last semester before graduating in Prague, working for a news service called Transitions Online. They cover the former Soviet republics and the Balkans, and it was my job to copy-edit and fact-check the articles. I also created graphics to illustrate the articles, which gave me the opportunity to put Stalin in blue eyeshadow and a nice set of pearls. It was a proud moment.
My first job out of school was as the senior online content producer for the Winston-Salem Journal in Winston-Salem, N.C., where I learned huge amounts about the realities of newspaper publishing.
I bid JournalNow goodbye in May 2008, and moved to Chicago, where I now work as a senior online content producer for Legacy.com. Legacy.com is the leader in the field of online obituaries, with more than 700 newspapers as clients. It sounds a little weird to say that you work for an obituaries company, but it’s actually pretty awesome.
If you’d like to contact me, you can email me at webmaster@lrawles.com.
