CHILDHOOD
High school senior and bus driver (with sister Dawn and mother Joyce), Brown's Summit, N.C.
Dan Conover was born to civil-rights-activist parents in Chicago, Ill., in 1963, but moved south at an early age. He spent the bulk of his childhood in North Carolina, moving to a commune in rural Brown’s Summit when he was 13.
As a teenager, Conover was interested mostly in basketball and John Steinbeck novels, worked a variety of odd jobs and compiled an indifferent academic record. He was reclassified out of low-level courses at the beginning of his junior year in high school and was a surprise selection to the six-week N.C. Governor’s School summer program.
When both his divorced parents moved away from the commune, Conover stayed on alone in their farmhouse to complete high school, compiling enough grant and scholarship money to attend Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. Though he was initially rejected by the university’s General Honors program, Conover became a Dean’s List student at ASU and gained entrance to the program at the beginning of his second semester.
Cuts to the federal Pell Grant program forced Conover to drop out of school during his junior year, followed by his first marriage and his four-year enlistment in the U.S. Army.
ARMY
On the Czech border, 1986.
Conover graduated with one of the first classes of recruits trained to operate the new M-1 Abrams tank and was assigned to the 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment, a border cav unit stationed in Bindlach, West Germany. During his two-year German tour, he conducted 26 One-Alpha border patrols, was assigned as a border operations specialist, took command of his first tank and earned his sergeant’s stripes.
Reassigned to the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment in El Paso, Texas, Conover served as an M1A1 gunner and later as the Troop Tactical Operations Center vehicle commander. He spent his final six months in uniform as the unit’s training and operations NCO and earned a secondary Military Occupational Specialty classification as a cavalry scout squad leader.
JOURNALISM
Conover graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, a Dean’s List GPA and the MacNelly Award (given annually to the best writer in the graduating class). During his two years in Chapel Hill, Conover worked as a reporter and columnist for The Daily Tar Heel, edited the journalism school’s quarterly journal and worked as a paste-up clerk at The Chapel Hill Newspaper. He skipped graduation to begin work as a reporter at The Mountaineer, a tri-weekly newspaper in Waynesville, NC.
His son, Luke Owen Conover, was born less than two months later.
In the summer of 1992 he was recruited to the daily paper in Shelby, NC, by a former boss who convinced him a stint as city editor would help his reporting career.
THE POST AND COURIER
With Luke just after he completed his first organized "fun run."
In 1994, on his 31st birthday, Conover was hired as the state/political editor of The Post and Courier, a 110,000-circulation metro in Charleston, SC. Though he still hoped f0r a career as a reporter elsewhere, he did well as an editor in Charleston and was soon placed in charge of the Sunday edition.
The Post and Courier had never won the S.C. Press Association’s General Excellence Award, but it won twice during Conover’s two-year tenure as Sunday editor. In both instances, each of the editions that comprised the paper’s General Excellence entries were Sunday papers published under Conover’s direction. The newspaper has not won the award since.
In 1997, Conover reluctantly applied for the paper’s city editor job after filling the vacant slot for several months. At 34, he was the youngest city editor at a Top 100 American metropolitan newspaper.
HARD TIMES
Metro city editor, 2001
Less than a month after Conover’s promotion, the newspaper’s executive editor suffered a heart attack, initiating a period of disturbing change. The basic newsgathering philosophy of the organization took a fundamental turn, Conover’s first marriage fell apart, and a weird series of untimely deaths began to haunt the news staff.
Things showed signs of improvement in 1999 when Conover married Janet Edens, the paper’s design editor, and management began a search for a managing editor.
But misery continued to stalk the paper. Conover’s beloved direct supervisor died in a car accident in October 1999, and the incoming managing editor espoused a management style based on creating conflict and tension between subordinate editors. The improbable string of newsroom deaths continued, and morale plummeted.
SCIENCE FICTION
Dan and Janet each turned down out-of-town job offers to maintain their joint-custody family, which included Luke from Dan’s first marriage and David, Lee and Callie Hartsell from Janet’s. Beyond his happy home life with their four children, Conover’s release from the stress of an increasingly dysfunctional newsroom came through fiction writing.
Conover’s short story “Eula Makes Up Her Mind” won the Phobos Fiction Award in 2001 and appeared in the 2002 science fiction anthology Empire of Dreams and Miracles. His science fiction would appear in four paperback anthologies between 2002 and 2008, providing him the publication credits for membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
BACK TO REPORTING
In November 2002 Conover requested reassignment as a reporter. The newly appointed executive editor agreed, but kept Conover in an editing job for an additional year. He used the time to write his first novel and create his first two blogs (the second of the two, Conover on Media, is still available on Blogger).
In NYC for an anthology publication party, 2004.
As a reporter in the features department, Conover devoted most of his energies to improving science coverage in the weekly Health and Science section, generating enthusiastic reader reaction that eventually drew the attention of the news department. In 2004 the paper nominated Conover’s body of work as its entry in the annual S.C. Journalist of the Year competition, emphasizing reader response to his innovative science and technology pieces. Conover won the honor in February 2005, shortly after the replacement of the paper’s executive editor.
NEW MEDIA
During the spring of 2005, Conover’s creative life began an unexpected shift. Since 2001, his focus had been on building a new career as a science fiction writer, but as his participation in the emerging new-media culture expanded, Conover became convinced that the was witnessing a revolution. By mid-summer, Conover had launched the paper’s first blog and created Xark, a group blog featuring several of his friends.
Storyboarding at UC-Berkeley, March 2006.
In the fall of 2005 he accepted a job working as the newsroom’s web developer. The job had only vague responsibilities but came with a mission from the executive editor to improve the paper’s website, which had fallen into disrepair after two years of management by the advertising department.
In December 2005, Conover wrote a white paper for senior management that made several predictions, including this one: If the company didn’t use its brand advantage in 2006-07 to move aggressively into various online niches, it would soon be dragged down by “an army of Davids” as new, low-cost competitors proliferated in its market. The warning went unheeded.
In March 2006 Conover attended the multimedia “spring-break semester” at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism as a Western Knight Center Fellow. A month later, he launched Lowcountry Blogs, devoting himself to covering the postings of local bloggers.
CHARLESTON.NET
When a long-promised upgrade to the Charleston.net CMS failed to meet expectations in the summer of 2006, senior management reassigned the site director, put Conover in charge and asked him to find a replacement CMS and then rebuild the site from scratch. Work on the new site began in the fall, but the project coincided with plans by the company’s new digital division to reorganize all the corporation’s Web operations. The new chart moved Conover off the newsroom staff in November 2006 and placed him formally in the role of interim Web Director, with the self-selected title of News Director. Though encouraged by his bosses to apply for the permanent director job, Conover declined to do so in favor of an eventual return to the newsroom. This proved to be a mistake.
On Jan. 31, 2007 — the same day he certified completion of Phase One of his site implementation plan — Conover welcomed the new director. Two days later, after learning of the new director’s plans to discard Charleston.net’s already ambitious site implementation schedule in favor of an early launch date, Conover gave his two-week notice to the Web team and returned to the newsroom.
FRIDAY 5 AND FUN & GAMES
"The tide has turned." (Fun & Games cartoon, 2007)
In February and March 2007, Dan and Janet Conover created an experimental Friday features section. Rather than theming the section around a topic, the new section (Friday 5) approached any feature topic by breaking it into five component pieces that could be arranged in any order. No Friday 5 front ever jumped an article to an inside page. Conover filled the section with a new feature called Fun and Games, offering weekly cartoon caption contests, a news-themed Wordfind puzzle and inventive news games. To make sure that both pages were represented properly on the Web, Conover created blogs for each.
Conover assigned all the Friday 5 copy and wrote all its text. He also drew the weekly cartoon, created the weekly Wordfind, took most of the pictures, kept up the blogs and shot, edited and posted the videos he produced for the section. These innovations were greeted with early enthusiasm, but as Charleston.net failed to meet its goals under the new director and the newsroom drifted back toward its original hostility toward new media, Conover found himself increasingly isolated.
OLD-MEDIA OUTCAST
First day of filming, "Brunch of the Living Dead," April 2008.
In 2007, the executive editor asked Conover to help him quietly build a case for returning control of the multimedia department to the newsroom. Conover believed that he would lead the new multimedia department, but the executive editor instead gave the job to an employee who had never edited a video. To Conover, the act signaled the end of his career at the paper.
In August 2008 Conover was one of the first people from the newsroom to depart the company under its buyout program. Three weeks later he began work toward certificates in Web and Graphic Design at Trident Technical College, part of a plan to reinvent himself as a “new-media Swiss Army Knife.”
FOR HIRE
Conover’s freelance career began in 2008 and picked up momentum in early 2009, collecting several print clients and a web consulting job. But he gained most of his exposure via a series of posts on new media written for Xark between March and May. His post “2020 Vision: What’s Next For News” was widely distributed within online journalism circles and earned him speaking engagements and honoraria from The American Press Institute, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute. His May post “The Newspaper Suicide Pact,” on the folly the industry’s 2009 paid-content schemes, was even more widely read.
Conover decided to give up his freelancing career in July 2009 and three months later went to work as a content engineering consultant for e-Me Ventures , a Chicago-based semantic technologies firm run by Abe Abreu Sr. Conover worked full-time for Abreu from November 2009 through February 2010, dropping back to half-time in March. In April 2010 Conover went to work for the Trek Bicycle Store of Mount Pleasant as a full-time mechanic and reduced his consulting to part-time.
