By: Justin Gick ‘16
Features Editor

For this month’s “Ask the Professionals”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mrs. Christina Mitchell, Chief Editor of the Courier Post newspaper. We had a very interesting conversation. I first wanted to know if she had always been interested in being a journalist.  She said she was not because she really didn’t know she liked it until after she did her first free lance gig for a local newspaper in the city of Philadelphia where she grew up.
Her major in college was English and she was just going to get a BA degree in English and just be done with it. It happened that she got some internships while she was still in school and she really liked it a lot.  Once she got out of college, she got her first job with a weekly paper in Northeast Philadelphia called The Northeast Times and she covered a lot of local news. She said, “When you start out young like that, with a newspaper that is smaller, you get to test the water.” She said that it was the best way to learn.
The high school she attended was Arch Bishop Ryan School for girls and there were about 700 in her graduating class in 1977. Mrs. Mitchell said she was a yearbook editor.  She started junior year and took over the editor in chief position in her senior year.  She said she doesn’t know why she didn’t get involved in the newspaper, but it just so happened that she walked into the yearbook office one day and that was that.
Mrs. Mitchell attended Temple University for three semesters as a communications major for TV and film, which is a great place to go for that, but it is a very large school and that major had a lot of students. In her class there were over 200 students. She was a little intimidated by it because she had come from a small Catholic high school from a different part of Philadelphia. She said going into North Philadelphia was a long commute every day and she just felt like it was not the right place for her, so she transferred and graduated from Holy Family University with a BA in English.
I wondered if it had been difficult to find a job after graduation. As it turned out, it wasn’t as she still had some contact with the newspaper where she did her internship. Next we discussed what type of stories she covered. Mrs. Mitchell said she had a police beat where she would go to the police station and get reports on crimes in the area.  She did entertainment, feature, and business stories. She learned both editing and writing and she said the editing part came easier to her. She still feels as though her writing isn’t where it should be and the longer you’re at it, the better you get.
When asked if she ever interviewed a celebrity, she shared that the first person she interviewed was Gloria Vanderbilt.  She interviewed Mrs. Vanderbilt and everything was going well until she made the mistake of asking Mrs. Vanderbilt her age. At that point the interview was over. She met many film actors, the governor, and different politicians. She has found though ,that the most interesting interviews are everyday people because those stories are the most interesting. She said you run across famous people and you find out that they are not who you think they are.  For example, she said Robin Williams has an antic personality on stage, but she sat next to him for a Dead Poets Society meeting and he was actually very shy. She added that she had interviewed Elizabeth Edwards, wife of John Edwards, shortly before she died.
Mrs. Mitchell’s career led her to The Courier Post.  Mrs. Mitchell said she wanted to work for a daily paper.  She was at the weekly paper and she basically sent her resume all over the place and had an interview at The Ganette paper up in North Jersey and she didn’t get that job, but they did have a copy editor position open at Courier Post.  After a while, she went into the features department and did more general writing.
I read her biography on the Courier Post website and saw that she had deep South Jersey roots. I asked her about what contributes to her writing about South Jersey, and she said that she has a lot of family history here; her maternal family is from Gloucester County, they were Italian Immigrants, her spouse is also from South Jersey.
Mrs. Mitchell also discussed her responsibilities as an editor.  She said she is learning about the individual aspect of the job.  It is really a hard feature in this business and they are anticipating that the print part of the newspaper will go and be all digital.  She has had to learn a lot about the new digital portion of the paper and said it is different because they have to rewrite headlines and the headline that attracts people in print may not attract people in the digital paper.  They constantly have to have eyes on their page. Readers today are looking for online news.
Mrs. Mitchell was promoted to Executive Editor in April of 2013.   I asked what went through her mind when she heard she got that position. Mrs. Mitchell said when she found out about it, she was thrilled; she totally imagined doing this at some point. Next I asked what it was like being content editor before holding this position. She said the difference was that she was basically in charge of the metro department and the metro reporters and they had some reporters in features and some reporters and editors in digital. Her job was to make sure they had interesting stories to put into the paper each day and that they had everything covered including breaking news. For instance, she talked about the earthquake we had a couple of years ago in South Jersey.  After they all were all safe inside the building her job was to say you go there, and you go there and get stories from people who are reacting from this earthquake because it was unheard of in South Jersey.
Did she have any advice for students who want to go into this field? Mrs. Mitchell said, “It is an industry that is really changing, a lot of people anticipate that papers will go out of business.  They anticipated it when computers first came out. They are still saying it is going to happen, but it has not happened yet.”
Her advice to anyone who wants to go into this business is, “It is always something different to learn, but anybody who wants to go into this business needs to make sure they have good writing skills and also a lot of digital skills.”
Mrs. Mitchell has worked in the newspaper business for 30 years in many different positions and she hopes to continue working as an editor.  I thanked Mrs. Mitchell for her time, and I wish her a lot of luck in the years to come.