Opinion

As I find my feet in Claremont

By BILL CHAISSON
On May 28, with the departure of Sam DiMeo, I became the new editor of the Eagle Times. I have worked in the newspaper business for about 15 years, but this is my first daily paper, and I am enjoying the pace.

The growing importance of the internet has meant that even the weekly newspapers feel compelled to post new content to their websites every day, making them behave like de facto dailies. So, I’m not finding the pace of the Eagle Times especially frantic. 

Journalism is my second career, and I left academia in part because of its glacial pace. It takes forever to get anything done at a university. To produce a single research paper you may have to accumulate data for months, take several more months to analyze and interpret it, and then the paper can take weeks to write, especially if you have collaborators. Between the time you submit it for publication and the time it takes to see the proverbial light of day can be over a year.

I much prefer putting together a newspaper once a week or once a day.

Although I was a poetry writing major as an undergraduate, I did a master’s degree in biology, and got my Ph.D. in geology. This is a very long story, but suffice to say, I spent a long time in graduate school and emerged with a broader knowledge base than most people do. I know quite a lot about the paleoceanographic changes that took place as a consequence of the emergence of the Central American isthmus, but I know a little about a lot of other things too. And that comes in handy for a journalist.

I also have a nerdy interest in various subjects that have their roots in academia, but are also of interest to the readers of newspapers. These subjects include the settling of  colonialNew England, American immigration patterns, the mechanics of providing safe drinking water, wetland ecology, the rules of English usage, the use of meta-fictional techniques in the novel, and architectural styles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. See? Complete nerd.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I have spent most of my journalistic career in a college town. My newspaper, the Ithaca Times, is in the eponymous city, but I mostly lived in Trumansburg, a village 10 miles north of the city. The population of Ithaca is 30,000, but more than half of these people are undergraduate students at Cornell or Ithaca College. The 1,600 residents of Trumansburg are an admixture of hippies, academic families, and people who have been there since the Iroquois were driven off the land.

However, Claremont is familiar to me for two reasons: (1) my family drove through it all the time on our way up to Danbury, where my great Aunt Alice lived, and (2) I went to middle and high school in a mid Hudson Valley city called Beacon that is quite like Claremont. 

None of my family members live in Beacon anymore – my mother now lives in Wilmot – but I swing through there once in a while to see how it’s doing. New York City people have moved in and revived the economy as an arts center. Tourists actually visit Beacon now and the long-time residents are quite divided about what has happened there. 

Claremont is not as far along in that comeback trajectory. I’m quite interested to hear what long-time residents think of the changes that are taking place here. What should or should not happen next here. I’ve live many places and the common thread is “nothing stays the same.”

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