Tag: Columns

Rig tour an eye-opening education on oil industry details

Over the last four years, it seems like all conversations in and about North Dakota have centered on oil and the impact it has made on the local landscape, culture and bank accounts.

Countless stories have been written and who knows how many more have yet to play out.
Last Monday, I was fortunate enough to see, smell and touch the source of those stories thanks to a rig tour provided by Whiting Petroleum Corp.

Blaine Hoffmann, Whiting’s superintendent for the Northern Rockies based in Dickinson, accompanied me and two European journalists to a rig southwest of Belfield. My main duty on the tour was to assist and be a photographer for Swiss journalist Charlotte Jacquemart, a business reporter for the New Zurich Times, who is in western North Dakota reporting on the oil boom and hydraulic fracturing.

Now I’ve read a lot about oil and the boom and have had a hand in some stories. But on Monday, I finally got my education.

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Social media connects us with readers

As a senior at Minnesota State University Moorhead, I started hearing about this thing called Facebook.

Friends at bigger schools told us about how great it was and some of my classmates even took to writing letters to MSUM officials basically demanding that we too gain access to this revolution.

People forget that in those early days, you couldn’t gain access to Facebook if you didn’t have college email address. That was just seven years ago this spring. It seems like a lifetime.

In less than a decade, this one website has been an absolute game changer for our world — and the media has not been excluded.

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Noodle the schnoodle, our lovable yet socially awkward dog

Columnist John Grogan was onto something when he started writing columns about his crazy Labrador retriever named Marley.

Like most people who have seen the movie “Marley and Me,” I laughed and even got choked up by watching the antics of the crazy dog that inspired the former newspaper columnist to compile a book of stories Hollywood ultimately turned into a film. After watching it a few years ago, I wondered if I would ever have a dog so lovably ridiculous it would compel me write about him or her.

Then, last September, Noodle the schnoodle came along.

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Fighting for the medals grandpa earned

Ask anyone who knows me well and they’ll tell you that if I wouldn’t have pursued a career in journalism, I would most likely have gravitated toward the subject of history — particularly, 20th century America.

I’m absolutely fascinated by stories of the Great Depression, World War II, the 60s and 70s, and how Vietnam and the Cold War led into the Reagan Era.

Perhaps part of the reason I was so interested in history was because of my grandfather, Clarence Monke.

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The controversy heard ’round the nation

Jamie Kuntz says he just wants to be a college football player. However, a decision he made on Sept. 1 not only derailed those plans, it made the 2012 Dickinson High School graduate the center of national debate and scrutiny that has forever changed his life. Over a span of two weeks in September, Kuntz went from a no-name freshman linebacker at North Dakota State College of Science to the subject of a national news story after he was removed from the team for lying to his coaches about an incident at a game, which led to him coming out as a homosexual in the national media.

Kuntz’s saga is The Dickinson Press’ No. 2 sports story of the year.

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