by Karen Vittek, undergrad

Janelle Hartman often writes about tragedy as the police beat reporter for The Register-Guard in Eugene.

Take, for example, the story she wrote on Don Smith, a young Eugene police officer who fell into a seven-year coma when he contracted a disease, most likely from bug bites he received on duty at a Grateful Dead concert in 1990. Smith died in January, leaving behind his wife, Cari, and their three children.

"You go into journalism hoping to make a difference," says Hartman, '86. "I got a lot of calls from people thanking me for writing that story."

They thanked her for telling the love story behind the tragedy -- the story of Cari Smith and the sacrifices she made after her husband became sick.

Hartman believes these everyday, heart-wrenching stories impact people. Often she's watched a community pull together after a tragedy or seen government improve because of her coverage.

"The public has an image of the journalist as a crusader exposing the IRS and government corruption. But that's not what the job is: it's about telling stories," she says.

Hartman's exposure to journalism started earlier than most. Her parents, Mary and Barrie Hartman, were working in the field when Hartman was born. Her father worked at The Register-Guard for 19 years, nine of them as managing editor. Hartman's mother ran the high school Oregon Scholastic Press Association, which was based in the School. She also gave seminars to high school journalism teachers.

Before she was old enough to go to school, Hartman was a regular at The Register-Guard. She remembers being interested in journalism from a very young age. When her elementary school's mimeographed newspaper stopped, she went to the principal's office and demanded to know when the paper would resume. She started working on school papers in junior high.

"Journalism is in my blood," she says. "It was sort of all I knew."

She learned a lot from both parents and remembers her mother helping edit her stories for school papers, especially in junior high. The only time Hartman recalled her parents pushing her toward journalism was when they sent her to a summer program for budding high school journalists at Northwestern University. She was the editor of her high school newspaper her senior year.

"Journalism is in my blood." --Janelle Hartman

After attending Lane Community College for a year, Hartman joined the J-School wanting to be an international journalist. She took Russian and international studies to augment her news/ed degree.

"The J-School gave me a great foundation to build from, and the people I had as professors were very valuable," Hartman says.

During college, she held a part-time internship at the Cottage Grove Sentinel. She was born in Eugene and has lived in or near Oregon's second-largest city her whole life.

Hartman says her decision to be a journalist was inevitable. Her parents moved to Colorado, where her father is editor at the Boulder Daily Camera and her mother works for the public relations department at Colorado State University. Her only sibling, younger brother Todd, worked at The Miami Herald before becoming an environmental reporter at the Colorado Springs Gazette.

"When I graduated from college, I wanted to go to a big city like New York," she says, adding that she's now happy she stayed. "I'm kind of an ordinary, small-town journalist. But there's a lot of satisfaction in that job, too."

After graduating, she got a part-time job in The Register-Guard's Oregon Life section writing small stories like food features.

"I remember I did a whole feature article on frozen yogurt," she says. The city editor offered her a temporary, full-time job covering the nearby town of Cottage Grove.

She went reluctantly, because Cottage Grove was even smaller than Eugene, and ran the bureau from her house. She's glad she went."I loved it. I got to cover schools, crime, and the people -- everyday you might write about something different," Hartman says. "In a small town, you get to know everybody."

Now the police reporter, Hartman stays on top of crimes, police politics and anything else involving local police, the sheriff's office, and state police in the area.

"I'm good with breaking news. It's an extremely high-stress job, but it's exciting," she says.

Hartman spends a lot of her free time during football season as a Ducks fan. Holding season tickets, she never missed a home game in 13 years until a Society of Professional Journalists national conference forced her to miss one game last season. Some of her favorite assignments were when The Register-Guard sent her to cover the 1995 Rose Bowl and the 1996 Cotton Bowl as a fan reporter.

Now Hartman uses some of her free time giving back to the J-School as a guest lecturer in classes. Her advice to today's students: "Get as broad an education as possible. Know a little bit about everything, and get experience."