At Last
Kriss Johnson is breaking new ground as the leader of the Kentucky Press Association.
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| “I’m the eighth woman to ever be KPA president and I’m the first NIE coordinator to be a press association president. It’s a real honor to have the Kentucky papers put their trust in me.” |
| Kriss Johnson, NIE outreach manager, Lexington Herald-Leader |
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By Kiersten Timpe
Sixteen years ago, Kriss Johnson took her first job at a newspaper. This year, she’s working for 146 of them.
Johnson currently is president of the Kentucky Press Association, a position in which she serves the daily and weekly newspapers in the Bluegrass State.
Over the past 16 years, she has taken a whirlwind tour of the newspaper industry, using her experiences as a former educator and current NIE outreach manager to bring a new focus to the KPA.
Her first newspaper job came in 1991 as NIE coordinator for The Greeley (Colo.) Tribune.
“When I first started, I had no knowledge of the newspaper industry. I was a teacher before that,” Johnson recalls. “Working at a small paper enabled me to be involved in all the departments.”
During her six years at the Tribune, she worked alongside the editorial, advertising, production and distribution staffs.
“We could get experience with all the business sides of it,” she says. “It really helped me get well-rounded as far as my knowledge base of newspapers as a whole, and how all the different departments are important for keeping the newspaper going as a business.”
In 1997, Johnson moved to Kentucky to serve as NIE outreach manager for the Lexington Herald-Leader. Building upon her classroom experience, she became instrumental in helping the KPA start a statewide literacy project involving serials. The KPA offers a free, 10-chapter story to any newspaper willing to devote a quarter-page of weekly space. Newspapers are distributed to classrooms along with scrapbooks students can use week by week to collect the entire story.
“It has really been good for the newspapers for growing their youth readership,” Johnson says. “We started with 30 newspapers, and last year we were up to 85.
“We tell the teachers to use the newspaper more than one day,” she notes. “Maybe one day, they just use the serial story; the next day, they use it for math activities. One paper can be a textbook for the whole week.”
Johnson says her work with the literacy project is what led to her becoming KPA president. This year, she encouraged the KPA to use the serial to teach civic literacy.
“Another initiative is helping the public understand how our government works and the importance of voting,” she adds.
As a result, the next installment of the series is “Mr. Dogwood Goes to Washington,” which focuses on freedom, the Constitution and the history of the nation’s capital. It is scheduled for release in September.
“We’re hoping that by sharing this information with young readers, they will go home and train their parents in these issues,” Johnson says.
In addition to the serial, the KPA devotes more than $5 million a year to services such as lobbying, freedom of information hotlines, legal defense and internships.
“Kentucky was the first state to develop an internship program to get youth in papers,” Johnson says. “We have college students sign up to be interns, and place them with papers. The KPA pays the salaries for about 24 different students … placed at papers each year.”
As KPA president, Johnson guides the organization in providing these services and brings her unique perspective to the table.
“It’s an exciting position to be in,” she says. “I’m the eighth woman to ever be KPA president and I’m the first NIE coordinator to be a press association president. It’s a real honor to have the Kentucky papers put their trust in me.”
Kiersten Timpe represented the Reading (Pa.) Eagle as a teen fellow at the 2006 NAA Foundation Young Reader Conference in St. Louis.
