I feel truly privileged to greet you all as the new editor of the Devils Lake Journal. Getting to this point in my career was a long time in the making. While my passion for journalism began with my father, pioneering broadcast news anchor Max Robinson, it took a while for me to take that leap into becoming a member of the Fourth Estate.
In a way, my first move to North Dakota over 20 years ago started the ball rolling.
I was born in Richmond, Virginia, and spent my formative years in Washington, D.C. After my parents divorced, my mother, Eleanor B. Robinson, brought me and my younger sister Maureen and brother Michael to grow up in her home of Amelia County, which held a town so small (officially called Amelia Court House) that it was more a village surrounded by rural countryside in the heart of Virginia.
My maternal grandfather, John Ed Booker, built the house where I grew up, and it still stands to this day. He worked in the lumber mill, and then served as custodian of my elementary school, all while hunting and fishing and farming food for himself and his family.
Josephine Booker, my maternal grandmother, helped to tend their acre-wide garden (which required my grandfather to use a tractor for tilling and plowing) on their 50 acres of land, while putting herself through college and teaching math in the local school system until retirement, whereupon she worked even harder with various projects of her choosing, including working with her church and elder assistance.
My mom raised us while working various jobs, which included driving the school bus that took us to class. I inherited her voracious appetite for reading and her sly sense of humor. Growing up in that environment, I wasn’t just Mark. I was Eleanor and Max’s son. I was Josie and John Ed’s grandson.
It was in Amelia where I was introduced to my first small-town newspaper, The Amelia Bulletin-Monitor, founded by Ann B. Morris (later Ann B. Salster) in 1973. I got to spend time briefly with the editor and founder a few years later as a young high school student, shadowing her during her workday. I can still remember the spectacle of the paper’s printing press and the smell of the ink permeating the newspaper’s offices.
However, starting when I was a child, I kept returning to the D.C. area, first to regularly visit my father, Max Robinson, who first appeared regularly on the 6 and 11 PM broadcast of Eyewitness News on WTOP-TV Channel 9 (now known as WUSA), beginning in 1969. Eventually teamed with co-anchor Gordon Peterson, he became the first African-American anchor on a local television news program, which soon dominated the ratings. After catching the attention of then-President of ABC News Roone Arledge, he moved to Chicago in 1978 to become part of the newly-formed ABC World News Tonight as the first African-American broadcast network news anchor in the United States, sharing the screen with co-anchors Frank Reynolds, based in Washington, D.C., and Peter Jennings reporting from London.
In addition to getting a thrill out of watching my dad on local and national news, I loved watching classic television from “Barney Miller” to “The Carol Burnett Show” to “Scooby-Doo” to “Spenser: For Hire.” I’m a cartoonist who can’t get enough of comic books and novels of adventure; Charles Schulz and Robert B. Parker and Spider-Man were my role models. My favorite movie is still “Silverado,” with its director Lawrence Kasdan my favorite filmmaker (another of his movies,“The Big Chill,” is a close second).
I’ve performed in children’s theater, and I’ve been a storyteller for kids of all ages. I’ve worked in various kinds of bookstores, including one that focused on my one of my favorite genres, mystery and crime fiction. I continue to meet via Zoom chat with a mystery book discussion group that I originally organized in 1996 at the Borders Books & Music based in Kensington, Md.
Throughout it all, journalism remained in my blood, I made a brief foray in broadcast media during the 1980s when I worked as a board operator for a public radio station in Richmond, Va. (and would later host a radio show in Wrangell featuring theme songs and film music), but for a long time, I was reluctant to follow in the footsteps of my father; he had cast a very long shadow in that field.
When I moved to Fargo with my wife in 2004, I began submitting editorial cartoons to alternative newsweeklies like The High Plains Reader and later, the now-defunct Pulse of the Twin Cities in Minneapolis.
After my divorce and return to the D.C. area a few years later, I became the editorial cartoonist of the Montgomery County Sentinel in Rockville, Maryland, where I rose through the ranks from cartoonist to reporter to city editor, moving from covering stories to supervising and mentoring other reporters.
After the Montgomery County Sentinel closed, and I weathered the pandemic lockdown, I found myself restless, missing that feeling of being plugged into a community that I only got from working in print journalism. I wanted an adventure.
Which is how I came to spend the past two years in the small Alaskan island community of Wrangell as a reporter for The Wrangell Sentinel where I covered the local education beat and high school sports, wrote features and profiles, while also providing photos as well. A month after I arrived in 2023, I helped cover the tragedy of the landslide the town experienced that November and the community’s subsequent pulling together to help those in need while mourning those six who were lost. During my time in Alaska, I learned a lot, wrote all kinds of stories, interviewed many people who offered warm welcomes and took plenty of photographs depicting life in Wrangell. Residents sometimes stopped me on the street or even came in person to the storefront office to compliment me on my work, a treasured new experience for me. It was wonderful to be a part of that community and provide a window to its daily life. Letting go of that and moving on was harder than I expected, but it also made me open to exploring other communities, like Devils Lake.
I look forward to getting to know this town. I arrived only a week ago, but being here feels both new, and somehow familiar. And I already feel like I’ve known Kathy Svidal and Louise Oleson forever. I know that I’ll be relying on their knowledge and history with the area as I provide local coverage of Devils Lake to the best of my ability.
Given that it’s my second move to North Dakota, and my second time as a newspaper editor, I’m reminded of a 1979 R&B song called “The Second Time Around” by the group Shalamar. It’s a love song on how a renewed relationship can be even more fulfilling. I’ll spare you all the “oohs” and “baby’s” but according to the lyrics, “I know you come a long way … but you don’t need that heart of stone, no, … you proved that you could do it … you can make it on your own … the second time around … the second time is so much better.”
Here’s to the second time around.
