Candace Wolf, The Dominion Post’s new general manager, has an abiding respect for deadlines.
She was making them for publication, in fact, while she still had a curfew.
That was at John F. Kennedy Catholic, the elementary and middle school she attended in her hometown of Washington, Pa.
There, she helped start the school’s newspaper, JFK Today.
It wasn’t long before the kid and once-and-future media practitioner found herself with a substantial beat carrying a plum placement.
“I was in charge of the teacher profiles,” she said.
“I can’t quite remember my first byline, but the profiles always ran on the right-hand side of the front page.”
Later, she was back again in those familiar classrooms and hallways, as a new teacher.
And a lot of her old teachers were still there.
“Well, that was interesting,” she said. “It was a full-circle thing.”
Full circles are what Wolf’s story is really about.
Coming home
When The Ogden Newspapers purchased The Dominion Post last month, Wolf’s name quickly rose to the top to lead the publication.
By then, she had logged nearly 27 years in newsrooms at the Observer-Reporter in her Washington hometown – she began her career there writing obituaries – and at the Daily Mining Gazette in Houghton, Michigan, where she most recently served as editor and publisher.
While she’s still getting to know Morgantown, she’s also very familiar with the region.
As she puts it, being a western Pennsylvania native, right next door to north-central West Virginia, has a way of doing that.
“I’ve had plenty of experiences up and down the I-79 corridor,” she said. “This is the same place. One big neighborhood. It really is coming home.”
And coming home is about more than just working in the region — it’s about becoming part of the greater Morgantown community, becoming part of the greater West Virginia University community.
Wolf has already moved into Monongalia County and looks forward to getting involved in the local scene. She also is working with the newspaper’s account executives to find ways to add value to the newspaper’s business partners.
For Wolf, being put in charge of The Dominion Post means becoming fully ingrained in the region and its happenings, of reminding folks of the newspaper’s 148-year history of chronicling the events and people of this region — and assuring them that will continue.
She’s up to the task.
Family, personal and professional
She and her husband, Damian, were high school sweethearts – and their two grown children still live in Pennsylvania.
So does her dad, in Washington.
Wolf stayed in the Keystone State for college, earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in English education and organizational leadership from Mercyhurst University, in Erie.
Those fledgling forays in journalism on the staff of JFK Today would come to define her career.
At Mercyhurst, she ran the school’s tutoring center and produced a newsletter, chronicling its life and times.
Wolf enjoyed learning things – and then explaining what she learned, by way of the printed word.
She also enjoyed a sense of place. She was an infant in Chicago when a job opportunity brought her family to Pennsylvania.
Her father was in human resources for Bethlehem Steel and her mother became a real estate broker, which, in another one of those full-circle turns, launched her career at the Observer-Reporter.
While juggling multiple part-time jobs, she answered an ad.
The Observer-Reporter was looking for an obituary writer to work Saturday and Sunday nights.
She got the job and pretty soon was getting the nuances of writing in the Associated Press news style – not to mention being taken by the life stories of her neighbors who had passed.
Narratives, of course, appeal to her English major, storyteller side.
A friend and workplace colleague who knew she grew up with real estate knowledge, soon recruited her for real estate advertising at the newspaper.
That gig got her to the design desk, as a nightside editor.
Wolf’s role expanded when Ogden acquired the Observer-Reporter, managing a production team for Washington and Uniontown publications.
Who wants to buy a lighthouse?
Ogden two years ago asked her to assume the publisher and editor duties at its Daily Mining Gazette in Houghton, a picturesque town of 8,500 on the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Houghton’s history was copper mining, which is how the newspaper got its name.
There, the new publisher would wield a pen and reporter’s notebook at events when other staffers weren’t available.
She became known for her regular contributions that celebrated people and places of the region that’s part of Michigan — and apart from it, too.
Wolf wrote about everything.
Such as Michigan real estate that couldn’t be more uniquely U.P. See, there was this lighthouse for sale, and she and Damian wondered aloud about making an offer, which naturally warranted a column.
And her profile and tribute following the death of a kindly church pastor she befriended early on in Houghton: a clergyman who had offered support and immeasurable comfort when her mother had passed months before.
She said she’s excited to be working with the Dominion Post’s news reporters and editors to ensure stories such as these get their appropriate coverage in Morgantown.
‘I read it in The Dominion Post’
Houghton rekindled her fire for community journalism, she said.
Not that it needed rekindling, she’s quick to add.
She wants to do the same thing for The Dominion Post, she said – “That means as much local, community content as we can give.”
Which means, she said, getting it all on the record and into the pages of the newspaper and on the website, DominionPost.com.
People.
Politicians.
Meetings, moments.
Serious issues, head-on – and fun detours, definitely taking the scenic route.
It means, she stressed, attracting a younger readership while continuing to nurture the people who have subscribed to the newspaper for years.
“We have a great community, and we have a great newspaper,” she said.
“I’m excited for the future. I want to be able to overhear someone say, ‘Oh, I read it in The Dominion Post.’”
