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It’s nice to be part of Pahrump

Hi there.

It is nice to be here in Pahrump as editor of the Pahrump Valley Times.

In case you missed the March 24 story by Selwyn Harris, I started as editor of this paper on March 20.

It’s been a busy time as my coworkers train me on a lot of the technology that goes into taking a column or news story like this and getting it into a newspaper.

I am new to Pahrump but not Nevada. In 2003, I arrived in the Silver State and worked in Reno most of that time. First it was as a reporter and an editor at the Reno Gazette-Journal and later at News 4/Fox 11 in Reno, where I worked on the digital-desk and as assignment editor.

In early 2016, I got hired as a reporter at the sister paper of the PVT, the Tonopah Times-Bonanza &Goldfield News, covering northern Nye County and Esmeralda County.

As editor of the Pahrump Valley Times and Times-Bonanza, I replace Arnold Knightly, who had hired me for the Tonopah reporter job. Knightly is now public information officer for Nye County government.

I am really excited to be in my new position, working with the skilled team here to keep building on the success of the Pahrump Valley Times. I hope my passion for newspapers and journalism will be evident and help serve readers.

My interest in news dates back more than 40 years when I would get up early to catch the 7 a.m. “CBS News Morning News with Hughes Rudd.” That show was really “old school” — far from what you see today on the “Today Show” or “Good Morning America.”

I think I got started watching that Hughes Rudd show because about 20 minutes in, it had a national sports segment with scores and game highlights. This was an era prior the start of ESPN or the internet age. So if I didn’t get up early to watch, I’d have to wait for the local evening news to catch the highlights or see how my favorite teams did.

Around the same time, I started following college football, which led me to the newspaper. I became a University of Michigan football fan at age 8. I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, only 45 minutes from Michigan Stadium where I started going to games with my dad in 1974. At that time, I learned that my hometown newspaper, The (Toledo) Blade, printed the then-Top 20 college football rankings on Tuesdays. So when I got home from elementary school, I’d dig into the sports section and find the rankings to see how Michigan was faring.

Within a few years, I found my way to other non-sports parts of the newspaper and eventually to journalism in high school, college at the University of Toledo and Columbia University’s journalism school in New York City, where I earned my master’s degree.

In my career, I am definitely known as an “X’s” and “O’s” journalist with a strong interest in serving readers with well-reported news stories that are timely, cleanly edited and relevant to readers. That’s the goal. Not every day is a success, but you try to do better each time.

I hope to meet as many of you as possible to hear your suggestions for this newspaper: what you currently like or don’t, what you’d like to see more of (or less), any concerns, story and photo ideas and more.

We’ll talk more about this in the coming weeks. In the meantime, feel free to write me at djacobs@pvtimes.com. I might use some of your comments in an upcoming column. Until next time, have a great rest of the week.

Contact editor David Jacobs at djacobs@pvtimes.com. On Twitter: @pvtimes

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