Sumter Item Executive Editor Kayla Green: Newspapers are important to all they serve

I was laid off from my first fulltime job as a reporter. Glamorous, right?

My story doesn't start with little Kayla always wanting to be a journalist, always having a love for newspapers or participating in yearbook classes. Looking back, though, I've always been nosy and looking for an adventure.

After I started auditioning for colleges to study acting, I quickly realized I'm not, in fact, very good at acting. I certainly wasn't putting in the effort others were. Having been born and raised in Gainesville, Florida, I did always know the University of Florida was my top choice school. I majored in English for a few weeks (or a semester, the timeline is a blip in my memory now) before understanding I didn't want to spend my life looking to the past, despite my love for reading. So, I figured I was good at grammar. And UF happened to have a great journalism school.

That's when I fell in love with it right away. Every class, every new thing I learned, from history to story structure to ethics and getting my first clips in the city's daily newspaper at 19, furthered me down this career path.

Then I got hit by a bike.

I was in the crosswalk heading into the journalism school building when some speedy student crashed into me. As I was laying there waiting to get checked for a concussion, I must have appeared as an opportunity. Though I didn't talk to anyone except the paramedic, the incident appeared in the student paper the next day. And they got some information wrong.

So, now, not only was I learning to love journalism, I had learned firsthand the power of talking to people in a story to get your facts right.

Fast forward to that first full gig. I was at a weekly paper outside of Atlanta. Like so many around the country, the paper wasn't doing well financially. They had to pick one of the two reporters to keep on, and they chose the new guy with more experience. I'd been there almost a year.

But, as fate or whatever you want to call it would have it, their sister paper had an opening. The publisher there was Vince Johnson, who I've been working with since. I've worked my way up through the newsroom, from clerking as a teenager to now serving as executive editor. Oh, and the photographer at that sister paper was Micah. We're about to celebrate our fifth anniversary.

I'm not a big "everything happens for a reason" person because I find the idea is often distorted to rationalize truly horrible tragedy. But, looking back, I can see a path. I've learned to be flexible and adaptable. To look for new opportunities and work toward a goal even when the goalposts move.

These words - flexibility, adaptability, innovation - put into action are critical at newspapers like ours and across the country. We're losing a newspaper a week across the U.S., according to The State of Local News Project from Northwestern University, a path that will mean the country will have lost a third of its newspapers since 2005 by the end of this year. People who live in 204 counties live in a news desert, which means they don't have a paper, local digital site, public radio newsroom or ethnic publication that serves their local community. So, many turn to national news sources.

But it's in the city council and school board meetings, the small business openings, the interactions between neighbors, where life really flourishes. Social media and national news, 24/7 cable networks, swing toward the negative. In the nooks and crannies of everyday life, we find the full picture of a community. One where people help each other. Where they work hard to bring money home for their family. Where they try to build and grow and love, and they struggle and sometimes fall down and sometimes go down the wrong path but live full, complete lives. That's what local newspapers show. They show a community as it is, tell the stories no one else is telling.

Newspapers are so important to the people they serve. They show that even if you get hit by a bike, keep going. If one path dead ends, take a machete and cleave a new one. Because you never know where it will lead.

Kayla Green is executive editor of The Sumter Item.