Tapped as an outstanding career and technical education student, senior Abby Lock will serve as editor-in-chief this year of the Montezuma-Cortez High School Panther Press.
Last year, she led the student newspaper’s staff of nine to awards from both the Colorado Mesa College Media Days and Colorado High School Press Association.
Her greatest task: deadlines.
“The most challenging part of being the editor of the Panther Press is keeping everyone on deadline,” said the 17-year-old. “We are all busy students and athletes, so it is sometimes difficult to manage our time effectively.”
A member of the National Honor Society, the French and Spanish Club, the Knowledge Bowl team, the cross country team and an alumni for High-School Leadership Montezuma, Lock’s utmost reward as editor-in-chief of the monthly publication is simply the final product.
“There is nothing more exciting to an English nerd than seeing one’s own work — which sometimes includes blood, sweat and tears — in newsprint,” Lock said.
Constantly connected via smartphone, Lock is part of the i-Generation, or Generation Z, of Americans who have been attached to digital technology from birth. Despite the group’s umbilical cord to electronic information, Lock is bucking her peers and keeping it old school.
“You cannot replace the aesthetic pleasures a newspaper can bestow upon its readers,” she explained. “As an editor, I feel privileged to be a part of that purist resistance.”
Holding a newspaper hasn’t stopped Lock from embracing emerging trends in journalism. She has also enjoyed digital story-telling assignments initiated in her Montezuma-Cortez High School photography class.
“Abby challenges herself in every project and serves as an excellent role model,” said photography teacher Sharon Englehart.
Acclaimed by student peers as an intelligent and fun hard worker, Lock said she enjoys being attuned to the various activities that go on in the classroom and the community.
“As a student journalist, it makes me more aware of my surroundings,” she said.
After high school, Lock plans to pursue an English degree in college, and possibly join the Peace Corps before finding a profession.
“My dream occupation is to teach internationally, perhaps at the American International School of Cape Town in South Africa,” said the daughter of Louis and Roberta Lock.
As a young journalist, Lock said it’s difficult narrowing down her favorite writer, but if she had to pick one, it would American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck.
“The political undertones and his character development in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ blew me away,” she explained.
tbaker@cortezjournal.com