GILROY
– Some vacant desks in The Dispatch newsroom have been filled
now that Night City Editor Andi Joseph and city government reporter
Katie Niekerk have joined the staff.
GILROY – Some vacant desks in The Dispatch newsroom have been filled now that Night City Editor Andi Joseph and city government reporter Katie Niekerk have joined the staff.
Joseph, 28, a 1996 Gavilan College graduate, has just moved to Morgan Hill after living for the past year in Kent, Wash. She replaces Dave Steffenson, who recently moved to Oregon.
Niekerk, 22, is settling into Gilroy after driving west from Denver, where she has lived almost all her life. She replaces Eric Leins, who moved to Idaho in June.
Andi Joseph
Joseph spent much of her life living “over the hill,” as Gilroyans say, in Watsonville. Her family moved there when she was 10, she graduated from Watsonville High School in 1994, and she worked as an editor at that city’s daily Register-Pajaronian for two-and-a-half years from 2001 to 2003. Her parents still live there.
“Family is everything to me,” Joseph said of her decision to take the job in Gilroy. “That was the pull here.”
She is also enthusiastic about joining The Dispatch during a transition period. On Aug. 17, the paper will switch to a new look and begin morning delivery, Tuesday through Saturday.
“There’s a lot of exciting stuff going on right now,” Joseph said.
As night city editor, Joseph will edit stories and design the front page.
Joseph said she has known she wanted to be a journalist since high school. She honed in on page design at Gavilan, in Gilroy, and moved on to major in journalism at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where she graduated in 2000.
She spent three quarters writing for SLO’s Mustang Daily student paper, covering news and sports, and spent her fourth year as copy editor for the twice-weekly Times-Press-Recorder in nearby Arroyo Grande.
The Register-Pajaronian hired her as copy editor upon her graduation in 2000. By the time she moved to Washington to be closer to her brother, she was designing the front page, maintaining the Web site, managing local columnists and editing wedding, birth and death announcement.
“Andi will bring a sense of professionalism to the newsroom,” City Editor Robert Airoldi said. “She’s in a position where she can display her creative talents to help bring a fresh and exciting look to the paper.”
Katie Niekerk
Niekerk, a Denver native, has wanted to be a writer since high school, but interning at the weekly Golden (Colo.) Transcript for the past year-and-a-half convinced her that print journalism was where she belonged.
“It’s where I got a taste of the newsroom … and how crazy it can get at times, but fun,” Niekerk said.
In Golden she learned the importance of political and government reporting and how to “decode some of the burdensome language” so people can understand what is going on.
“Policies and decisions may seem boring to some people, but it really affects quality of life,” she said.
Her goal is to motivate people to get involved in shaping the way their home town works.
“A lot of people sit and pound their fists and complain,” she said, “but if you get involved you can make the change happen.”
Niekerk graduated in June from the University of Denver, where she studied mass communications with emphasis in journalism, contributed feature stories to the college’s weekly Clarion newspaper and was assistant editor of her senior yearbook.
She came to love California through childhood visits to relatives in Santa Monica and by spending her freshman year at Westmont College in Santa Barbara.
“I always thought I’d come back here someday, and here I am,” she said.
“It took some time to find the right person to cover City Hall, and in Katie we found that person,” Airoldi said. “Her enthusiasm and desire are only matched by her writing skills. She’ll do a great job.”
