Speicher
By Charlotte Caldwell
[email protected]
SIDNEY — Sidney Daily News (SDN) Editor Melanie Speicher will retire from full-time work on Friday, April 19, after 25 years at SDN and about 40 years in the journalism business.
Speicher graduated from Celina High School in 1976 and from Ohio University in 1980 with experience in radio and TV journalism and a passion for sports journalism.
She applied to radio stations out of college and they said she had too much experience and couldn’t pay her the amount she was worth. Eventually, she applied as a reporter at the Wapakoneta (Wapak) Daily News, and, “40 years later I’m still in the business,” Speicher said.
”I wanted to be the next Joe Nuxhall on Cincinnati Reds baseball, so no, I didn’t fulfill my goals, but they changed. I found writing to be more satisfying than that 30-second airbyte. A newspaper clipping stays with you longer than that newsbyte ever will,” Speicher said.
She spent about 15 years at Wapakoneta and was first hired as the localife editor.
”I didn’t have a clue what I was doing,” Speicher said. “We got lots of newspapers up there and Sidney was one of them. We’d look through the papers every day, and Margie Wuebker was the localife editor down here, and I cut out examples of what she did for weddings and anniversaries and engagements and that’s how I wrote my stories. The Sidney paper had influence on what I did even when I worked at Wapak.”
Later she became the news editor at Wapakoneta.
Speicher started her career at SDN as a stringer in 1998 after leaving Wapakoneta and got hired full-time after working part-time for someone on medical leave. A couple of years later, she became the news editor. Her official start date at SDN was April 19, 1999. Her first story after becoming full-time was about a resident who killed four teenagers, so she immediately started building relationships with the Ohio State Highway Patrol, the sheriff’s office, and the police department.
Speicher recounted how her stories got in the paper when she was a stringer: “Way back then I didn’t have a computer at home, so I’d type it up on a typewriter and there was another employee who lived in Wapak, so she’d stop by in the morning to get my story and bring it down here and somebody else would type it up and put it in the system.”
She said she decided to stay in small-town journalism because “I like getting to know the people. There’s lots of stories to tell and I like being part of a community, and I don’t know if you can really get that in a big city, and I’ve never lived in a big city so I don’t know.”
Over her career, of which she estimated she has written over 5,000 articles, Speicher has had the opportunity to tell the stories of many veterans, and those are some of her favorite stories to write.
At Wapakoneta, she talked to a couple whose only child was killed in Vietnam, and they agreed to be interviewed when they never talked about it because Speicher had a connection with the wife who worked at a local funeral home. At SDN, she has covered the Shelby County veterans to Washington, D.C. trip for the paper about 10 times and got to travel to D.C. with the veterans.
”You learn about them. You got to see the emotion on their faces when they’d see their memorials, or the emotions when some school kid would come up and shake their hand and say thank you, because some of them never had that before,” Speicher said about the D.C. trip.
“Veterans hold a special place in my heart,” Speicher said. “I have a lot of uncles and cousins who served. It takes a lot of guts to say, ‘yep, I’ll put my life on the line for this country,’ and to have people not appreciate it like they did in Vietnam, it’s sad. But that’s changing I think, and it’s groups like going to D.C. that’s helped heal things, and it’s helped other people realize that what they did was important over there.”
Other stories and partnerships she was involved in at SDN that stood out to her were a recent one about the dad delivering his baby in the family van and working with Sara Olding at Sidney High School to put the “Voices” columns from high school seniors in the paper.
”Those are the kind of stories you look forward to because you see so many bad things in the business and it’s nice to know that there’s still good things out there,” Speicher said.
She said one of her accomplishments at SDN is getting the print edition out so the most newsworthy items are on the front, and one of the challenges is making everything fit in the paper with the recent two days a week shift.
“I think that’s what is the most fun about the job, is no two days are ever the same,” Speicher said. “I tell people putting together page one is like a jigsaw puzzle; you have to find all the pieces, then you have to figure out how they’re all going to fit on the front page so it’s appealing to that person walking by at a newspaper stand, or they get it in their mail and they want to sit down and read the stories.”
“It can change from minute to minute,” Speicher said about the print editions. “You can have your front page planned for the next day and you walk in and overnight there’s been a fire or something else and you gotta change your thought process of what’s important.”
Another challenge she has worked through is the shrinking staff.
”When I first started here I think we had 15 people in the newsroom, and now we have four, and we’re still trying to put out the same amount of work that 15 people did. Some days we accomplish it and some days we don’t. It just waits until the next day and we start all over again,” Speicher said.
She was also at SDN through the rise of computers and the internet; changes to laying out the paper; and multiple owner changes. She told about how she had some knowledge of computers coming to SDN because Wapakoneta had them first and she was able to share her knowledge with the newsroom.
“The guy who came in to train us said ‘if you feel too stressed out, play Solitaire’ just because that’s giving you the motions of learning how to move the mouse and you can relax from doing it,” Speicher said. “So I think we practiced for like a week before we actually started laying out the paper on the computer and that changed everything.”
She has even experienced a phrase most people know from the print journalism world, “stop the presses,” which means a paper needed to be changed while it was already printing to include the most breaking news.
”In my career, we’ve yelled stop the presses once,” Speicher said. “I was still at Wapak, and that was when the ‘Challenger’ space shuttle crashed, the first one, and we were on the press, and the editor yelled stop and we redid the top of the front page. Down here (SDN), the big one was 9/11 and we were already on the press, and the decision was made to not stop it.”
Speicher has maintained many relationships in the community over 25 years, but perhaps the most important ones were the relationships built in the newsroom.
“I’ve worked with veteran reporters and ‘newbies’ who have just graduated from college. We’ve all learned from each other. I think that’s the great thing about journalism … everyone shares their knowledge with all the other people on the staff to ensure we put out the best newspaper we can on a daily basis,” Speicher said.
Sheryl Roadcap, a former reporter for SDN and the current editor of Miami Valley Today, said, “Melanie will certainly be missed as the editor of the Sidney Daily News. For me, as a mentor and the go-to person in any questionable situation, her invaluable knowledge will absolutely be missed. However, I am very happy for her to be able to move on and enjoy her next stage of life.”
Patricia Ann Speelman, the retired lifestyle/business editor of SDN, said, “I worked with Melanie for eight years. It was a privilege because, as an old-school journalist, she always put the truth first as a writer and as an editor. Facts, not quasi-reality, were most important in the stories she crafted and the issues she edited. Her staff, her publishers and her readers could always count on her honesty, her integrity, and her dedication to putting forth reliable, timely news. Qualities like Mel’s are becoming rarer as broadcast journalists increasingly allow editorializing to pass for news. She will be missed for those. On a personal level, I always appreciated her friendship, her dry sense of humor, and the yummy treats she shared with the newsroom!”
Tom Millhouse, a former reporter for SDN and a former page designer for the Celina Daily Standard, said, “I enjoyed my years working with Melanie at the Daily News. She was a real professional, first as a reporter and then as an editor.”
Two quotes from Speicher can sum up her passion for the industry and the impact she has made: “If you’re in journalism, it’s because you love it, and it’s not for the pay,” and “I know I’ve influenced or helped people whether they’re doing a fundraiser for something or just want their story told, I’ve influenced somebody’s life. Just like they’ve influenced mine.”
With her newfound freedom from full-time work, Speicher is looking forward to getting back to crafting — like scrapbooking and cross-stitching — and spending more time with her two children and five grandchildren.
An open house will be held in Speicher’s honor Thursday, April 18, from 4-6 p.m. at the newspaper’s office.
