There were a lot of changes at The Laker/Lutz News in the past year. We redesigned our website and Facebook page, increased the size of our news page to match the size of most daily newspapers, added a new B section primarily for photo features and prepared to take our East Pasco edition of The Laker from an every-other-week publication to weekly.
As I reflect on 2014, I see it as a year that we invested in the foundation of our business – upgrading both our printed newspaper and our digital platforms.
With a foundation that is solid and ready to support our future, it’s time to focus on the next phase — improving and expanding the talents of our news staff to produce a publication that gives our readers a broader array of interesting stories and timely news. Leading the effort to tackle our ambitious editorial goals is B.C. Manion, who has been promoted to editor of The Laker/Lutz News.
You most likely will recognize B.C. Manion’s byline. She has been our community editor since August 2010. She frequently writes about people and groups who make a positive impact on our communities, and is our lead reporter covering education and upcoming events, including her popular “Worth The Trip” feature, which identifies attractions, just a short drive away, that are fun and affordable places to visit.
B.C. is a graduate of the journalism program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Her roots in community journalism go back to her first reporting job in Omaha, Nebraska, where she planned coverage, took photographs, and filed news and feature stories for zoned editions of a weekly newspaper.
She added to her reporting skills by working at a small daily newspaper in Hastings, Nebraska. Her next reporting job was in the highly competitive South Florida newspaper market, where she competed against reporters from The Miami Herald and The (Fort Lauderdale) Sun-Sentinel.
She joined The Tampa Tribune in 1985, where she worked for 23 years and covered everything from government to gardening. Her work there appeared on the pages of every section of the newspaper except for Sports.
Her current assignment includes staying abreast of issues in Lutz, a community she first learned about when she covered zoning and development issues – her initial reporting beat at the Tribune.
We were fortunate to lure B.C. to The Laker/Lutz News the summer of 2010. Many journalists with so much experience at a metro daily newspaper would consider working for a small weekly newspaper like ours a “step down.”
But not B.C. She saw it as an opportunity to do stories that can have a real impact in the daily lives of our readers.
She understands the value of keeping readers informed of changes that affect their lives, whether that be the opening of a new hospital, the construction of a new state college or the battle over a proposed site for a new charter school.
She especially enjoys writing about the unsung heroes in our communities who quietly go about making a tremendous difference in the lives they touch.
B.C. understands the importance of teamwork, welcomes story ideas from residents and believes that community newspapers offer a forum for local stories that cannot be found anywhere else.
Those are some of the values that I was looking for in editor. So when the time was right to hire an editor for our papers, B.C. was the obvious choice.
Please join me in welcoming B.C. to her new position as editor of The Laker/Lutz News. She is an outstanding journalist. She is passionate about her work and about serving our communities. I am confident she will play an instrumental role as we work to become an even better newspaper in 2015.
Published January 7, 2015
