Among the ranks of proud Eastern Michigan University alumni is newspaper editor Amalie Nash, and here are 10 things you probably didn’t know about her.
1.Nash is the assistant managing editor for metro and state news for the Detroit Free Press. Nash said her job consists of overseeing the metro staff and all the stuff it covers, and also overseeing a new strategy they are trying. The new strategy seeks to narrow in on the community, but also recognize that it’s a state-wide paper and they also have to try and reach the bigger audience.
2.Nash graduated from EMU in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. Nash said, “I really liked the instructors that I had and I really liked the experience.”
3.While Nash was studying journalism, she was also living it. She said while she was in college she worked for Heritage Newspapers covering city hall. She thinks the most important thing is try to gain experience, since that is what journalism employers want.
4.Nash came back to EMU for her master’s degree. She said, “If I could be a professional student, I would be.” Nash chose to focus on criminology and sociology. “As a journalist, it’s good to know about human nature and how to cover it,” Nash said. “I think it made me a better reporter, well rounded, and I really enjoyed it.”
5.While Nash was getting her master’s degree, she was working full time at The Ann Arbor News. She said, “The Ann Arbor News was very precise, there were a lot of opportunities there,” Nash said. “I covered school and a lot of things around Ann Arbor, but I always knew I wanted to cover harder news. I stayed there a lot longer than I probably would have because it was such a good experience. I was there 11 years … and then I became the online editor a couple years before the news closed.”
6.During her time at The Ann Arbor News, Nash worked a lot with the police doing regional coverage. She said it was similar to what is now referred to as hyper-local content. She thought police reporting was more exciting, since it required chasing a lot of news instead of sitting in meetings. She said she would spend her mornings going around the police office collecting police reports.
7.“Writing police beat stories … I always tried to not just cover the news and mayhem, but the issues and stories within,” she said. Nash used this mentality when she had to write about a series of burglaries for The Ann Arbor News. “I wanted to cover the story, not just by covering burglaries,” she said. She spent some time with the detectives of burglaries and saw how they investigate them. She interviewed a burglar in prison and ended up weaving the information into one story. Nash’s story won first place in feature writing for the Associated Press.
8.Nash was destined to work for the newspaper business. She said she was always interested in writing and always wanted to know what was going on. When she was 10, she delivered newspapers. “I wanted to be the one writing the news,” she said. When Nash was in middle school she would make her own little newspapers for her class, and when she was in high school she worked on the school paper. “I always spent my lunch period working on the latest story,” she said.
9.Nash has also had to write some hard stories. She said one story that sticks out for her was in 2002-03 when there were a series of drug overdoses. The numbers had doubled from the year before, so she really wanted to do a story on it. She wanted to focus not only on the numbers, but the stories behind the numbers. “There was one family I finally convinced [to talk],” she said. “I spent some time with them and convinced them that the story could really help other families.” Nash said she thinks these kinds of stories create more empathy, and we learn how to talk to people and have better conversations.
10.Nash has grown and learned many lessons from her experiences. “I had a sort of underachiever attitude, and I felt that I had to do the best I could to prove myself,” Nash said. “You should never lose that attitude; you should never become relaxed.”
