Jon Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines, and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Complete index of Jon Kennedy's Jonal articles

Jon Kennedy's latest book is The Everything Guide to C.S. Lewis and Narnia, now in stores, from Adams Media, F&W Publications. From May 9, 2007 through July 2, 2008 his blog entries or "Jonals" were articles inspired by readings in Lewis's work that didn't fit into the book. Click here for a list of all articles in the C.S. Lewis Overflow series. The book is available for purchase in support of the Liberty Museum in Nanty Glo and is also available on Amazon.

Jon Kennedy

Jon Kennedy's 'Postcards from
the Nanty Glo in My Mind'

A ramble through the pressroom
. . . or how I got here

Jonal entry 1091 | February 26 2009

There was news Tuesday that Hearst Corp. is considering closing or selling the San Francisco Chronicle. It is the largest Northern California daily newspaper, the only formidable one in San Francisco per se, but it lost $50 million last year and was losing every year for some years before that. Hearst, which published the former competitor San Francisco Examiner for generations, had lusted for the larger Chronicle since the days of Citizen Kane, at least, and was finally able to acquire it in 2000 and sold or virtually gave away the Examiner to someone who then put it out as a free daily. (The state government, I believe, would not allow the Hearst Corp. to "kill" the Examiner, which it would proably have preferred, as doing so would create a monopoly newspaper city.)

The Examiner's web page indicates it is still published, but its home page coverage doesn't suggest much investigative journalism is going into it. Perhaps it's more a competitor now for the Bay Area Guardian (a mostly politics and entertainment weekly) than the Chronicle. Palo Alto has a seemingly successful free daily, which began as a weekly 15 or 20 years ago after the former Palo Alto Times merged with the Redwood City daily and, I believe, they subsequently both folded. Palo Alto and Redwood City are relatively small cities (by California reckoning) roughly half way between San Jose and San Francisco, Palo Alto being adjacent to the Sanford University campus.

All of this is ironic to me, who wanted to go to college to become a novelist/writer, but was dissuaded by an early professor who said the novel was a dying art form or medium (his indecision about which should have been a clue to clueless me). Newspaper writing was safe, so even though Pitt had no journalism major at that time, I majored in "English writing," which was the next best thing. And those of you who have followed my meanderings here over the years know I was already working as a fulltime "newspaperman" at the time, as editor of the Nanty Glo Journal. That led directly to the managing editorship of a Christian weekly paper in New Jersey, which in turn led me to seminary (ministerial graduate school), which led me into ordained ministry, which led me to the University of California Santa Barbara (where I incidentally picked up my Master's in mass communication at UCLA, a gruelling commute), and which led me to Stanford University by 1972.

All of my years in campus ministry were mostly devoted to producing magazines, that were circulated at campuses around the country, and creating and teaching courses on various facets of the media, not just Christian media but all kinds of journalistic endeavors. The classes, which were well attended on the Stanford campus and offered for university credit, were my major evangelistic outreach, the means of my making a wide range of contacts within the student population.

Then my wife bailed out of the marriage after 14 years, leaving me with no ministry (a choice I voluntarily made, based on the orthodox interpretation of the biblical requirements for the ministry). That led to my teaching adult writing courses at a local college and soon after starting that, becoming the founding director of the Writers Connection, which led to my being offered executive editorship of a growing community newspaper group serving most of San Jose. That was the best job while it lasted because our citywide circulation gave me exposure to most of San Jose and I was able to put in practice things I had been teaching in my Stanford courses. But the relationship with my direct employer, the publisher, was not good, and after seven years I was let go for the stated reason that the company was going through a financial crisis and had to reorganize. But I never fully believed that...it might just as well have been because the publisher wanted to start using full color pictures in the papers and he felt he couldn't afford both editing and process color printing.

I didn't think when I began this that it would become a ramble through my journalism career, but all's well that ends well. I did well by getting out of journalism before the print media died out. After the Woodward-Bernstein Watergate revelations, journalism was the hot major for incoming college students. I don't know for a fact, but would guess that these days journalism departments are dying even faster than newspapers of every kind. I hear the hot thing to get into these days is Crime Scene Investigation. But I'm happily retired; writing books and volunteer-working one day a week back at Stanford with the Orthodox Christian Fellowship, and not looking to start a new career.

—Webmaster Jon Kennedy

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A ramble through the pressroom . . . or how I got here

A ramble through the pressroom
. . . or how I got here