John Blodgett assumes editorship of The Western News

The Western News’ new editor, John Blodgett, has come full circle from his rural Southern Maine roots in his recent move to Libby, where he aims to find time for his love of storytelling in words and photos.

Though he’s lived in large metropolitan areas including Washington D.C., Boston, Salt Lake City and, most recently, greater Los Angeles, and though he once held U.S House and Senate press credentials, Blodgett said he’s no stranger to small-town life.

“Buxton [my hometown in Maine] was no bigger than Libby,” he said, adding that he’s also lived and worked in Missouri and Illinois.

After a short stint working at The Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell in 2004, Blodgett has been keen to return to Montana. “I had a great idea of what I was coming back to...It’s all familiar, not a culture shock,” he said with a smile, even though he’s accustomed to covering a lot more crime than happens in Libby.

As a child Blodgett was into biking, baseball and birding. He didn’t consider himself a writer, he said, “until seventh grade when my reading teacher, Mr. Norton, had us write an autobiography and I wrote that I wanted to be a writer, photographer and skier.”

A shy child, Blodgett saw journalism as a way to interact with the world, “an empowering way to get outside myself,” he said. After being editor at his junior high school paper The Eagle Express, Blodgett was hooked.

Nonetheless he lost sight of his dream in the following years, starting as an undergraduate at Boston University in mechanical engineering and then shifting to marketing. But when his beloved grandmother died about six months before graduation, the dream snapped back to reality.

“I had one of those ‘it’s now or never’ moments,” he said. “That’s when I decided to enroll in graduate school for photojournalism.”

Entering the University of Missouri-Columbia in January 1992, Blodgett covered the Democratic Convention that summer and eventually had three consecutive internships in rural Illinois and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. At each one he was held as responsible and to the same expectations as the staffers.

“They (the editors) didn’t differentiate,” he said. “I loved it.”

Following his internships he got on staff at the Daily Herald in Provo, Utah, leaving after nine months to become an online photographer for Citysearch.com. It paid more, and it lead to a series of jobs that were better paying but farther and farther from journalism. Some of the jobs came closer, including the Kalispell position and two stints as editor of monthly business magazines in Utah, but corporate copywriting paychecks proved enticing.

Blodgett recalled eventually feeling “sad that I had left newspapers far behind. I was making a lot of money (but) I was miserable.”

In the second major it’s-now-or-never moment of his life, Blodgett purposefully left that world behind in 2014 to regroup. He found himself gradually returning to journalism, first as a freelancer for the Press-Enterprise of Riverside, California and then a staffer for its parent company, Digital First Media, which operated in the area as the Southern California News Group.

Taking a $50,000 pay cut to again work as a journalist let Blodgett return to his first love. Yet after almost a year he wanted to do more photojournalism and to write more stories beyond the breaking news beat, which in Southern California included numerous homicides and shootings. (On Christmas Day 2016, he reported on five shootings in San Bernardino.)

Blodgett believes local journalism is as much about serving as historians and preservationists as it is about reporting and helping people make sense of the world around them.

“I think that’s part of the value of newspapers and part of our job,” he said.

Blodgett looks forward to understanding what makes people here tick, even those he doesn’t necessarily agree with, and he invites readers to tell us their questions and concerns.

“I want people to seek us out to tell stories and know that we are receptive to listening,” he said.