PD copy editor Marc Valles: Meet the guy who wrote this headline

“Behind the Byline” introduces you to those who write stories, shoot photos, design pages and edit the content we deliver in our print editions and on pressdemocrat.com. We’re more than journalists. As you’ll see, we’re also your neighbors with unique backgrounds and experiences who proudly call the North Coast home.

Today, we introduce you to Marc Valles, one of our copy editors.

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“Heard from Santa Rosa?” Dad asked from his hospital bed.

I hadn’t yet; the offer letter would arrive five days after he died. A month later, I would start work for The Press Democrat.

“He would have been proud,” Mom would say later. No small comfort there.

I joined the copy desk in August.

I write some headlines. Some nights, the editors hand off stories and photos and I design North Coast pages, and try to make pleasing shapes to best showcase my colleagues’ work while packing six feet of online headlines into a six-inch print hole.

Some nights, I pick which state, nation and world stories appear in the paper, and build some of those pages, too. Other days, I do the same for Opinion pages, or Business pages, or Home pages. Still other times I proofread some of my coworkers’ work.

I’ve worked a dozen media jobs across California over 45 years. My previous job was running the newsroom for the Times-Standard in Eureka — every day an incredible opportunity and a humbling experience.

My first job was an unpaid internship. Then there was the child labor: I was Dad’s remote control.

“Marc, get up and change the channel.” I would get up, and change the channel. It was the start of a lifetime career in the remote media industry.

When I was 4, my parents discovered I could read after I looked up from a newspaper on the floor and asked, “Who’s Bob Hope?”

Growing in a direction that we all mistook for up, I kept on reading newspapers.

When I ran out of newspapers, I picked up dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, Twain, Shakespeare, Marvel Comics, the usual lighthearted Russian literature — and perhaps the late 20th century’s most concise and instructive work of political science, Mad Magazine.

In high school, I became a full-blown newspaper delinquent, and sank into a life of staying up past my bedtime arranging words and pictures.

Thank you, Mr. Chris Johnson, my journalism adviser at American High School, for arming us with a rudimentary understanding of the First Amendment and libel law, and for letting us do the work.

Thank you to the student-run newsroom at the Daily Nexus at UC Santa Barbara, for having no journalism adviser. We learned by doing.

I want to break with convention and declare now that I did not go into journalism because I’m bad at math; I’m bad at a lot of other things. Five years of Spanish, can’t roll my r’s. Barely graduated high school. Thrown out of college – too many nights at the paper, not enough class, in every sense.

I came to and stayed in this profession to have fun getting paid doing work that needs doing.

It’s been awhile since I last wrote, and I don’t know how much I have left in me. My first byline was a former teammate’s obituary; we were 16. I left my byline off Dad’s, though, and that was the last writing I wanted to do for a while.

Prior to joining The Press Democrat, I wrote a few columns over the years for the Times-Standard (with bylines), and wrote many more editorials (no bylines). The editorials were an interesting exercise. I didn’t agree with all of them, but you have the conversation and you express the consensus.

Have I bled for journalism, at least while practicing it? Yes, profusely. (See scar, left index finger, courtesy of a late-night slip of the blade, back when we edited with knives and hot wax.) Have I been booed at by a crowd of hundreds because of journalism? Yes. Have I had death threats left on my voicemail and slipped under my door because of journalism? Yes.

But the work needs doing. Again: THE WORK NEEDS DOING.

Without local journalism, dear reader, you’re not only going to wind up paying more for less, you’re also going to find yourself paying more for more: More corruption, more looting of the treasury, more abuse of power, the works.

Somebody has to take the time and get the facts.

The facts, like gravity and momentum in Looney Tunes, matter. Eventually. And if I can, in this job, help you not turn into a tiny puff of white smoke at the bottom of a deep and shadowy cartoon canyon, we’re both better off.

You can reach Copy Editor Marc Valles at marc.valles@pressdemocrat.com.