Sue McMillin
I’d much rather write your story than my own bio. But if you’re putting your story into my hands or taking my advice, you’d probably like to know a bit about my life as a journalist, storyteller and editor.
I’ve been writing since childhood – poetry and short stories and then for school newspapers and yearbooks. I have a journalism degree from Michigan State University, where I worked for three years at the State News – and spent more time at work than in the classroom. News reporting seemed to be my calling. First “real” job was as a reporter at the Spinal Column, a feisty suburban Detroit chain of weeklies and not a chiropractic journal. Then on to another small paper in Wisconsin, back to Michigan for some freelance writing and eventual stint as a staff writer for a pair of city magazines. All those publications, by the way, no longer exist.
I moved to Colorado in fall 1980 and soon landed a job as the night cop reporter at the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. A few months later I was asked to move to the military beat, which scared me because I knew so little about it. Turned out I loved it and spent nearly a decade covering the military and aerospace, turning complex and technical issues into readable stories for the average citizen. I traveled with soldiers and airmen on maneuvers in Central America, Europe, the Mohave Desert and the Arctic, among other places and participated in national security seminars at the Army and Air Force war colleges. Then I got a desk job as the night city editor before leaving daily journalism to raise my kids and assist my aging parents. I freelanced when I could and occasionally worked a fill-in shift at the Gazette. But it was hard to be out of the newsroom and I returned full-time as city editor in June 2002 – just as the Hayman Fire was blowing up in Teller, Jefferson, Douglas and Park counties.
A decade later I would direct the paper’s coverage of the devastating Waldo Canyon and Black Forest fires. My job titles changed as the newspaper added digital, restructured and shrank but for most of 13 years I was in charge of local news coverage, coaching reporters and editing their articles.
I participated in the East-West Center’s 2011 Senior Journalists Seminar, a post-9/11 program aimed at increasing dialogue and understanding between the U.S. and Asian countries with large Muslim populations and the center’s 2014 Pakistan-U.S. Journalists Exchange, a program to promote dialogue between journalists on issues facing the two countries and the challenges of media coverage. In late 2015 I took the city editor position in Durango, a much smaller newspaper. It was fun for a short time, until I became interim editor and was told to reduce publication frequency from seven to four days and cut the staff by a third. I did that, laid myself off in the process and moved to Victor to figure out what semi-retirement might look like.
That’s when I began freelancing – learning what I did and did not want to do and finding a handful of steady clients. I moved to Cañon City in June 2019 and focus my reporting on southern Colorado, contributing regularly to The Colorado Sun. I have contributed to the Denver Post and Colorado Life magazine, and have edited a handful of books.
Job title: Freelance journalist
Topic expertise: Southern Colorado
Location: Cañon City
Education: Michigan State University, BA in journalism, 1976
Honors & Awards: Aviation/Space Writers Association: 1991, two Central Region Awards of Excellence for space writing; 1990, National Award of Excellence and Central Regional Award of Excellence for space writing. Livingston Awards: 1988, International Reporting finalist for coverage of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty.
Contact:
Email: suemcmillin20@gmail.com