Ross Markman: Big News in Small Towns

By Vincent Walker

The people in the journalism field thought to have some of the most important jobs are the ones working for The New York Times and reporting on big-time political and financial news for the city. However, perhaps more important are the less well-known journalists such as Ross Markman who write for local papers and take on community issues. In a smaller area, small news is really big news because it most likely affects the entire population of a small town in some way.
    
Ross Markman, a reporter for the Havre Daily News in Montana, has turned small town journalism into his career and has been very successful at doing so. Markman, as profiled in Newswriting on Deadline, has a process for doing so: first he has to decide whether or not a story is newsworthy. Next he has to do a fair amount of investigating to find evidence to support the news he is considering covering and bringing into the public eye. Then he must turn facts and evidence into an article that will grab the readers’ attention.  He must create a piece that is blunt yet not biased, informative yet not too informative as to be boring to the reader. It cannot be just a list of facts.
    
The end result of Ross Markman’s writing is an attention-grabbing, informative article that can lead to change in a community, and any change in a small to midsized community is a big change to the people who live there. Ross Markman is an insightful and no-nonsense journalist who takes his work very seriously.