MICHAEL JESSE

I'm Michael Jesse, library director at the Dayton Daily News.

I started out as a reporter at the Sandusky (Ohio) Register after getting my BA in Journalism at Kent State University in 1979.

After several years as a reporter I moved to Indianapolis and started working part-time on my MLS at Indiana University while working in the library at the Indianapolis Star and News.

In those days the Star-News library was not yet electronic and I initially worked as an abstracter of news clippings. I remain a big fan of the elaborate, color-coded, hierarchical indexing/abstracting system used for decades at that library (and I tend to explain it all in great detail if asked, so be careful). After the advent of the electronic archive I became chief news researcher (we called it "reference librarian" then).

In 1991 I completed my MLS and in 1993 I came to Dayton, succeeding the late Michael Passo.

The Dayton Daily News (daily 160,000, Sunday 210,000) was the first paper in the Cox chain, having been founded 100 years ago this August by James M. Cox, who in addition to being one of the great publishing barons of that era, was also governor of Ohio and ran for president in 1920 (with a young FDR as his running mate).

Here at DDN, Cox is still universally referred to as "the governor" and his old corner office remains as it was when he died. We suspect he still drops in to use it now and then.

This year Dayton reporter Russell Carollo won a Pulitzer for a series on flaws in the military health care system. I did the news research on that project and was one of a dozen or so supporting players listed as contributors.

The Dayton Daily News has a reputation for being innovative. In the 1980s it was one of the leaders in CAR and in the early 90s it was one of the first large papers to fully paginate. We embraced Newsroom Without Walls and Public Journalism.

Our library tends to be innovative also. In 1995 we were one of the first to get started in the now-booming "newsroom intranet" trend. The real site is behind a firewall, but you can see a demo if you wish. (But if you do, take note of the date; I don't update the demo very often).