Santa Fe Reporter editor and AAN editorial chair Julia Goldberg will depart next month.
Goldberg has been editor of the Reporter since December 2000, leading the publication through a period in which it won multiple state and national awards, and was an IRE finalist for a multi-part series on prison health care.
Goldberg says she is leaving to focus on her own writing, specifically finishing a novel she has been working on for several years, and completing a non-fiction book proposal. She also plans to teach.
“Leaving the Reporter is not an easy decision,” she said. “It’s been my life for most of my adult life, and I am very lucky to have an incredible staff of people with whom I work, and a great paper that plays an important role in the community.” But, she says, “I am ready to focus on different areas of my life, and I think it’s important the Reporter have an editor whose focus and energy is 150 percent on the paper.”
Goldberg started as an editorial intern at the Reporter in 1991. “I actually didn’t get the unpaid internship the first time I applied for it,” she said. “But they said I was their second choice. So when I saw the intern they had hired drop off the masthead after a few weeks, I called and said, ‘So am I hired now?'”
Following her internship, she held a variety of part-time editorial positions at the paper before departing to complete graduate school. She returned in 1997 as a staff writer, after the paper had been sold to City of Roses, which also operates Willamette Week.
“As someone who has worked side by side with her for more than ten years, I know first hand how much effort she’s put in and how much she’s sacrificed on behalf of this paper,” said Reporter publisher Andy Dudzik. “As a result of her dedicated stewardship, the Reporter today is arguably one of the best small newspapers in the country.”
“She will be missed and extremely hard to replace,” he added.
Goldberg has served AAN in a variety of capacities over the past 10 years, as a member of its editorial, membership and diversity committees. She was elected to lead AAN’s editorial committee in 2009, and was the driving force behind the forthcoming Best of AltWeekly Writing 2009 & 2010 book, last year’s Writers Workshop in Las Vegas, and the complete overhaul and redesign of this website, which merged the former aan.org into the current incarnation of AltWeeklies.com.
“Working with AAN editors and on AAN projects has been incredibly rewarding,” she says. “I’m going to miss the community of editors, and all the incredible smarts and camaraderie.”
Goldberg’s final day at the Reporter will be April 27.
