Thursday, our own Tim Engstrom, editor of the Eden Prairie News came to inform us about how EP News functions and all of the behind the scenes work to make the newspaper run smoothly.
Eden Prairie News is part of Southwest News Media which has a main office in Savage. EP News is printed in Hutchinson on Wednesday mornings, following the proofing which takes place Tuesday afternoons. Now, what does Tim do? He coordinates the content that goes in to the Eden Prairie Newspaper and the Lakeshore Weekly News. He also sets strategies and manages staff. Part of this process is overseeing people such as the news reporter for each outlet, a regional reporter, the sports editor, the community editor, and more. Reporters get story ideas via readers, local officials, court meetings, and police officers. Tim explained that very Friday there’s a meeting to determine which stories will be featured in the newspapers. However, sometimes things don’t go perfectly as planned, as news is constantly changing. Some fun facts he shared with us, is that there are 30 words per inch on a newspaper, and a lot of his work consists of a strategy called line editing which is mostly punctuation errors. We are very grateful to have Tim in our club.