June 2007
Editor's Note
Twenty-eight years ago this month I sat at a desk in my basement in a house long since sold and pieced together the third issue of Seattle’s Child. My work schedule flexed around my one-year-old daughter’s naptime, bedtime, and the Thursdays she spent with her grandparents. Our staff of four-- mothers with toddlers had never heard of satellite offices, but we worked in our pajamas at odd hours, laying out the paper on the kitchen table as our families slept. No e-mail pinged at our concentration; we went to the almanac for our fact checking, not Google. But then as now, thank Goodness, life was mostly about getting a meal on the table, a good sleep, endless searching for lost socks and making choices when faced with a fork in the road.Time has carried us along--different houses, more children, a divorce, re-marriage. My father who cradled the one-year old and cheered her first steps as a toddler and mine as a publisher, lies in a grave just a few blocks from my present home. I didn’t raise my five children, they grew and I tried to keep up. At best, I managed to pause long enough to savor the particularly good moments before they were over.
I haven’t sat in this editor’s chair at Seattle’s
Child since 2000. As I write, my youngest teeters at age 10 with
one foot in childhood and the other reaching towards adolescence. She
bought an iPod last weekend with her own money (saved, she reports, from
allowance, extra chores, and collecting the coins from our laundry room
for three years). Now tiny white earphones have claimed her ears. The
toddler who tugged on my leg back in 1979 came to dinner last night with
her husband.
Over the years I have enjoyed enormously watching my children take courageous
leaps into the unknown, be it middle school, medical school or a move,
all alone, across the country to a new job.
This spring I was beginning to look for my own new courageous leap; an opportunity to create something really useful and inspired.
With that in mind, when the Washington Post bought Seattle’s Child about a month ago and asked me to come back as editor/publisher, I gulped and seized the moment. Now my kids are giving me the pep talks.
We’re an interesting family of publications you might think — about as unexpected as the blended family that fills my house. What Seattle’s Child and the two other Post newspapers in our region, The Herald in Everett and La Raza, share in common is a tradition of good journalism, community involvement and service.
We will do our best to inspire, inform, provoke and entertain you. And in return, we ask that you tell us what you liked, what you didn’t like and how we may best serve you as parents in this present day.
It’s good to be back. Thanks dear reader, for taking this fork in the road with us.
Ann Bergman, Editor/Publisher
abergman@seattleschild.com
©2007
Seattle's Child, a publication of the Washington Post Company
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