‘The end of an era’
Longtime editor retires after 45 years on the job
If you ask Ronda Haskins’ newsroom colleagues to describe her, you’ll get a number of different answers. Some describe her as a “living library” of knowledge. Others think of her as a mentor, a role model, a “go-to” person for asking any question they could think of.
Haskins labels herself a “Swiss army knife” because of all that she’s learned, and the skills she’s developed, from the myriad of different jobs she has held throughout her 45 years with the Daily Camera and Longmont Times-call.
But at the end of last year, Haskins, one of the newsroom’s longest-tenured employees, finally decided it was time to hang up her hat. Her official last day with the paper was on Dec. 31.
Looking back on her career in journalism, Haskins said she was “really happy with it.”
“I just really loved making a paper every day,” she said. “There were times when it was really difficult, when there were disasters and acts of God — you know, fires, floods — (but it was satisfying) to have been able to watch all of that happening and put it into a newspaper so everybody could read about it (and) get information about it.”
Haskins has always enjoyed writing and working with words. By her freshman year in college, she already knew she wanted to study journalism. In 1975, she got her first job working part-time for the local newspaper in her hometown of Oberlin, Kan., and the following year, she graduated with a journalism degree from Fort Hays State University.
Once out of school, Haskins started reporting and editing for the Mccook Gazette in Nebraska. After two years there, her husband — a retail store manager — got an offer of a job transfer in Denver, and he accepted. Haskins’ husband also was battling cancer, and his doctor at the time was based in Denver.
But for Haskins, moving to the city presented new career opportunities. The pair found a home in Broomfield, and Haskins started looking for work. After taking the Associated Press test at the Denver AP Bureau, she applied to become an assistant to the Sunday magazine editor at the Camera. She also dropped off her resume and clips with the Times-call, she said, but it was the Camera that offered her a job. At the time, the two papers were not under the same ownership.
When Haskins first started with the Camera in September 1978, she didn’t imagine she would stay there for the rest of her career. Her plan was to stay for a while, gain some experience and then try to find work at a bigger daily paper like the Rocky Mountain News or
the Denver Post.
“I had the thought off and on through the years of, ‘Oh, well, maybe it’s time this year to go apply at the Post or Rocky Mountain News,’” she said. “And I just enjoyed what I was doing at the Camera so much that I just kind of stayed there through the ups and the downs.”
Many who know Haskins have remarked on her versatile skill set and the number of different jobs she did in the newsroom over the years. Haskins held editing roles in the features, business and editorial departments. At various points in time, she also supervised interns, did copy editing and worked as part of the design team, and she eventually also started working for the Times-call when both papers came under the ownership of Prairie Mountain Media.
“It was like, I’d do something new, get some knowledge, and then it would be time to move over and help out another department or help out another editor and gain more knowledge,” she recalled. “It was mostly just a lot of fun, learning lots and lots about journalism.”
Over the course of her career, she especially enjoyed working on feature stories — “I’ve always been a sucker for a good slice of life story,” she said, whether it was a story about a youth drum and bugle corps or a Saturday night at a laundromat — and fine tuning her interview technique. She said her goal was always to ask sources questions they’d never heard before and would need to think about before answering.
Haskins even said she “got a kick” out of deadlines.
“(The question was always,) ‘How good a job can you do that day?’ And sometimes, it wasn’t a great job. Sometimes, you failed. But the next day, you’ve got to get up and make a new paper again,” she said.
During Haskins’ time at the Camera and Timescall, she also helped see the paper through local and national catastrophes such as the Jonbenet Ramsey murder case, the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center buildings in New York, and the 2013 flood that devastated Boulder County.
Some who have worked for the newsroom remember Haskins as a mentor and teacher. Julie Vosslerhenderson, an editor for the Denver Post who spent several years as an editor with the Camera, described Haskins as a “calming force” who was good at “seeing the forest for the trees.”
And Lindsay Lovato, who formerly worked alongside Haskins on the design team, said she had learned much from Haskins during her time with the newsroom.
“She has taught me more than just the skills that I need in journalism and in a newsroom. She’s also taught me a lot of life skills and management skills. So she’s been a huge mentor and important person in my life because of her willingness to teach people and help people learn how to do things better and be better,” Lovato said.
Other past and present colleagues have praised Haskins’ deep knowledge gleaned over many years. Prairie Mountain Media publisher Jill Stravolemos described Haskins as a “living library” who “leaves really big shoes” to fill. Former PMM publisher Al Manzi said Haskins’ knowledge of the community would be “impossible to replace.”
Matt Sebastian, now the managing editor of the Denver Post, started working for the Camera in 1997 and stayed for about 20 years before moving on. Haskins was his first editor there, and he characterized her retirement as “the end of an era” for the paper.
“I always enjoyed working with Ronda. … Her departure really is a big loss in terms of institutional memory,” Sebastian said. “As newspapers get smaller, people tend to stay there for shorter periods of time and move on to different jobs. And I think that kind of longevity is not something we see a whole lot of anymore. It’s very valuable.”
Haskins said she doesn’t regret her choice of career, but she wishes she could tell her younger self not to worry so much about making mistakes.
“When you make a mistake, you should own up to it and fix it. But (if) it’s something that you’ve written and edited, it’s personal to you. And I took that responsibility too much to heart when I first started out,” she said. “I wish I could tell Baby Ronda, ‘Don’t take it so hard. You can fix it, you can learn something from it, you can do something better tomorrow.’”
And she wants to tell new and aspiring journalists that although the industry is always changing, she believes there will always be a place for local news.
“There’s always going to be new ways to get information, but people still need the information. The need for responsible local journalism is not going to go away,” she said.