Kimberly Roots didn’t need Entertainment Weekly to end up in her dream career. She just needed The Northeastern News.
Roots, the current editor-in-chief of TVLine, an entertainment news site, served as The Northeastern News’ style editor from 1999 to 2000. The Northeastern News changed its name to The Huntington News in 2008, after the publication became independent from the university. In her five years at Northeastern, the then-journalism major dabbled in a bit of everything at The News, starting as an all-around staff writer before becoming The News’ style editor, a fitting role for her aspirations to work in entertainment writing.
“I came up on Entertainment Weekly, that was like the Holy Grail,” Roots said. “By the time I got to a place in my career where I could get a job like this, [TVLine] was just like this beautiful godsend.”
Starting as a staff writer her first year, Roots joined The News looking for any opportunity to write. Philip Bell, the style editor at the time, assigned her a story that “nobody else wanted.”
“There was like a Scrabble tournament, an all-night Scrabble tournament or something, on campus that some group was doing,” Roots said. “When I turned my story in, he was like, ‘Oh, that’s good. Here, do more.’”
The moment Roots felt like she had made it at The News, however, was at a Northeastern News party, when another member of The News approached her about her piece.
“A guy came up to us … we shook hands and I’m like, ‘I’m Kim Roots,’” Roots recalled. “And he’s like, ‘You wrote that thing.’ And that was the first time in my life that anyone had ever been like, ‘Oh, that work you did. Like, I thought it was great.’”
Roots continued to chase the feeling that came with that recognition — one that made her feel like she “was in the right place and doing the right thing.”
As her time at The News progressed, Roots continued to delve into the style section, working her way up to assistant style editor before becoming style editor in 1999. Throughout the day, Roots could often be found in The News’ office on the fourth floor of the Curry Student Center.
“I remember when I was learning how to do the layout, that took me a little bit longer,” Roots said. “And so I would go in and try to work on that in between classes and try to make my layouts … It became the place that we went to be with our friends and work on stuff.”
Despite completing three co-ops, Roots’ commitment to The News never faltered, and she often wrote pieces while working a full-time job. During her co-op at The Patriot Ledger, a daily publication in Quincy, she worked on stories for The News during her lunch break.
“I remember very clearly sitting in a restaurant on my lunch break during co-op writing about Tori Amos for music, like a concert review or something like that,” Roots said.
After her year-long run as style editor, Roots became a columnist during her last year at Northeastern before graduating in 2001. Her column was titled “Root Causes.” It was in this role, Roots said, that she wrote one of the pieces that she’s most proud of: a piece about Kerry Dugan, a professor in the philosophy department at the time.
“I took my first class with him freshman year. I think I took my final class with him senior year. He was just the best, like the absolute best,” Roots said. “I wrote one of my final columns just about how much he had taught me and what a good instructor he was.”
At the time, Roots explained, the university was pushing to “raise their status” as an institution, and that included replacing professors who were not “getting published in academic journals.” These professors were “eased out.”
“I wrote my final column about how if you are in the university, you should take a class with him and it will not do you wrong,” Roots said. “I found out later that it did help with the situation in his department a little bit.”
Roots’ and Dugan’s friendship expanded beyond the walls of the university. Dugan even officiated Roots’ wedding to her husband Nate Fredman, with whom she worked at the Northeastern News.
“[Dugan] ended up doing the ceremony,” Roots said. “He died a couple of years ago and I miss him very, very, very much. But like even more than that, Northeastern lost something amazing when he went, and that column is the thing that I’m the proudest of.”
Reflecting on her time at The News, Roots said that without the experience she gained, she doesn’t think she would have ended up where she is today in her career.
“It really cemented that I wanted to write about culture and not write hard news,” Roots said. “I left Northeastern with a bunch of my work that I could show people and say, ‘Look, I do know what to do.’”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source huntnewsnu.com ’
