By BRYAN ODELL
J Alumni News staff
Diane Lindquist
Diane Lindquist covered the civil rights movement, met Harvey Milk during his push for gay rights and has now started her own Mexican-business Web site. This 1968 J school graduate said her J school education prepared her well for a wide-ranging career.
“I learned the basics at UNL,” Lindquist said.
Lindquist said J school teachers enforced standards students could expect in the real world.
“I remember taking a beginning-reporting class where you had one day to write a story. And every minute that you were late, your grade would drop a point,” Lindquist said. “Those lessons left an impression on me.”
Some of her teachers even required the middle initial of a source in the story and would look up the names of sources in the phonebook to be sure student reporters had them right.
“I’ve run into people in this business that wouldn’t last three minutes at Nebraska,” Lindquist said. During her time at the J school, Lindquist completed internships at two Nebraska newspapers and the Kansas City Star.
Ruth Brown, now a J school advertising professor, went to school with Lindquist.
“Diane was really interested in journalism. She had this real desire and interest in the field and knew what she wanted to do,” Brown said.
After graduation, Lindquist got her first job as an editor for the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer. She began her work during the heat of the civil rights movement, arriving three days before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tenn.
Starting out, Lindquist also faced the challenge of being a woman in a man’s world.
“Back then, you didn’t see a lot of women hired in the news department,” she said.
Nevertheless, Lindquist made progress at the Observer. She eventually worked her way into the news department and spent 10 years working there before deciding to move on to the Courier Journal in Louisville, Ky.
“That newspaper was interesting because they actually sent their copy editors out to the institutions they covered,” Lindquist said. “You got a feeling for what it was like out there in the real world, which is important as a journalist.”
Living history
A few years later, Lindquist got a job doing news-feature operations for the Pacific News Service in San Francisco. And once again, Lindquist had the chance to live through history, this time amid the gay rights movement.
“I remember when Harvey Milk was assassinated,” Lindquist said. “His death was really sad.” Milk, who died in 1978, was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. He represented Lindquist’s district on the city council, and she had several opportunities to speak with him.
“I thought he was an interesting person,” Lindquist said. She remembers this being a time when gay people began to come out of the closet.
“People were feeling free to express who they were,” Lindquist said.
During this time, Lindquist also developed an interest in Mexico.
She got a job at what was then the San Diego Union as an editor to cover Mexico full time. As was true in many of her previous job experiences, starting out in Mexico wasn’t easy.
“Journalism at that time in Mexico was not practiced the way that it is in the United States,” Lindquist said. “Newspapers were operated by a political party. Stories were basically paid for.”
Lindquist took an unpaid leave of absence to educate herself on the region as well as to study economics and other materials to aid her coverage.
“The more information you know about a subject, the better you can do on reporting it,” she said. When she returned to the paper, Lindquist asked to become a reporter so she could be closer to the action.
“I had a pretty good understanding of what was going on in Mexico, and I thought I could probably do better stories myself,” she said.
Over the next few years, Lindquist improved as a writer and learned the importance of telling a story.
Proving her instincts
But her big break came when she pushed her editors to cover meetings for the North American Free Trade Association and its potential effect on Mexican relations with the United States.
“It was a new era in Mexico. The country had always been closed off and not open to trade,” she said. “This was going to change everything.”
Despite her persistence, her request to cover NAFTA was denied. Three months later, The Wall Street Journal broke the story she had pushed for.
“It was a setback. But it also proved to the editors that I could be trusted,” Lindquist said. “They knew I had reliable sources and that I had lots of good scoops.”
Onell Soto, a reporter at the San Diego Union-Tribune (the merger occurred in 1992), said Lindquist will do whatever it takes to get the answer to her question.
“Diane is accurate and puts things in context,” Soto said. “She’s very thorough, she digs and she doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”
The newspaper eventually gave her the freedom to travel to cover the stories she wanted.
Yet while everything seemed to be going great for Lindquist, the American newspaper industry itself was shrinking. Circulation began to decrease, and people began to get nervous about the future of the industry.
Finding the good in the bad news
But there was a bright side to the new technology newspapers had to adapt to.
“The paper started to put my e-mail address at the bottom of my stories,” Lindquist said. “I started getting e-mails from all over the world.”
It became clear to Lindquist that, while the newspaper industry was contracting, her work was attracting interest on a global scale.
So when the newspaper offered a buyout that she was eligible for, she took it and began to plan her own Web site. There was just one problem.
“I knew nothing about the Internet,” Lindquist said. So on her own, she learned Internet software and how to optimize search engines for maximum viewership online.
“I didn’t really know anybody who did this sort of thing,” she said.
One busy year later, Lindquist launched MexBizNews.com, offering news and features on business issues in Mexico overlooked by many other news outlets. She lined up sponsors, and everything seemed ready to go.
“Then the recession hit,” she said. “Sponsors began to drop out, and a lack of funds made getting the Web site off the ground difficult.”
But as with other challenges, Lindquist said she is determined to make this project succeed.
Growing readership and sponsorship
She spent most of October in Mexico City, and her readership has been steadily increasing. She has found new sponsors and hopes to find even more as the recession comes to an end.
“Years ago, you had to be a multimillionaire to have your own newspaper,” Lindquist said. “Now, you can use the Internet to do it inexpensively.” She plans to hire freelance reporters, add video and do whatever else it takes to improve her Web site.
“Diane has been successful because she is focused on her career, accomplishments and finding a niche,” Brown said.
But Lindquist said she knows the Web site is a bit of a gamble.
“I don’t know what to expect,” she said. On the other hand, a little risk has never stopped Diane Lindquist.
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