From the editor’s desk: Troy Heie touches everything you read

Published 11:30 pm Friday, June 2, 2023

The purpose of this weekly column is to give readers a view behind the scenes of the Rogue Valley Times newsroom, and nobody is more behind the scenes than city editor Troy Heie.

In baseball, the catcher is positioned at the point of the diamond, making them the only player with a view of the entire field. In the RV Times newsroom, Troy sits in a corner that commands a view of everybody in the room. He is the keeper of the weekbook, a living document that contains all of the stories being worked on — from city council meetings happening that day to enterprise stories that may not be ready for weeks — when they are anticipated to run online (down to the hour), whether photos have been assigned, and when it will run in print.

There’s nothing in the news sections of the paper or website that Troy doesn’t touch, except ads and obits. He reads and edits stories, writes and edits headlines and photo captions, and puts together the schematics — we call them dummies — that our page designers use to lay out the paper. Then he proofs the pages after they are laid out and before they are sent to the press.

And since we started the Rogue Valley Times in February, he’s worked seven days a week every single week.

All of these things make him the most important person in the newsroom, and it’s why he was the first person I hired (about an hour before I called Buffy Pollock and made her the paper’s first reporter).

When you are starting a newspaper from scratch, you need people with multiple skills. Here’s a brief list of Troy’s previous newspaper jobs, starting in 1991: Editor of his college paper, editor of The Weed (Calif.) Press, news editor and interim editor of the Ashland Daily Tidings, sports reporter, sports editor, local government reporter, education reporter, Los Angeles Times bureau reporter, copy desk chief at the Mail Tribune, page designer, city editor at the Rogue Valley Times. This list doesn’t come close to capturing his entire resume, which included some of the most noteworthy news events in the U.S. in the past 30 years.

“We put out a paper on 9/11 at the Tidings in four hours when we were an afternoon paper,” he recalled. “We put out another afternoon paper the day the shuttle disintegrated over Texas. I have a Who’s Who list of people who died on deadline — George Harrison, Marlon Brando, Pope John Paul II, Michael Jackson …”

He’s been working at newspapers in the Rogue Valley for 30 years, starting as education reporter for the Tidings in 1993. By that time, he had already been a cub reporter at a weekly paper in San Diego County, and an education reporter for a daily in California’s Central Valley.

He left the Tidings to be editor of the Weed Press for a year, where he ran the office, pasted together pages, covered city council and emptied quarters out of the street boxes.

Then he did what any sane person would do — he toured Europe for six months. 

“Then the Ashland vortex hit me again and former Tidings editor John Enders hired me as news editor of the Tidings in 1998,” Troy told me over coffee at Starbuck’s Thursday. “I kept coming back to the Rogue Valley because I knew it would be a great place to raise children. Having my kids grow up here was a great reason to go through the ups and downs of all the newspaper changes we’ve been through. It’s always been my goal to keep working here, and there have been many times it wasn’t looking so good.”

Being possibly the most anonymous person in the newsroom isn’t a negative, he says.

“I probably haven’t had a byline in the paper for 10 years, since I wrote for Oregon Outdoors (at the Mail Tribune). My name isn’t in the paper, but I touch everything in the paper everyday. That’s a cool thing — to be a part of what everybody is producing.”

Note to self: Make sure Troy gets a weekend off soon.

— David Smigelski, Rogue Valley Times editor