June 1, 2006

By Yellow Springs News

Robert Mihalek has resigned as the editor of the Yellow Springs News after eight years with the paper. His resignation is effective June 1.

Reporter Diane Chiddister has assumed the editor’s position. Reporter Lauren Heaton will serve as associate editor.

Don Wallis, who was the editor of the News from 1977 to 1992, will purchase Mihalek’s shares in the Yellow Springs News, Inc., and will hold the shares on a temporary basis. He joins Chiddister as the majority shareholders in the News. Karen Gardner, who worked at the News from 1990 to 2004, also owns shares in the newspaper.

Mihalek joined the News in 1998 as a reporter. In October 1999 he was named acting editor when the paper’s editor, Amy Harper, went on sabbatical. He was named editor in June of the next year.

During Mihalek’s tenure as editor, the News was honored for many journalism achievements, winning at least five awards in the last six years in the Hooper Show, the primary contest for Ohio weeklies. In February, the News won the General Excellence Award, the top prize in the Hooper contest, among the state’s smallest weekly newspapers. It was the first General Excellence Award for the News since 1985.

Chiddister has served in several capacities with the News over a 20-year period. In the mid-1980s she worked as reporter under Wallis when he was editor. In the early 1990s she wrote a column, “A Walk in the Village,” which was honored three years in a row in the “Original Column” category of the Hooper Show, with one third-place and two first-place awards. She returned to the News as a reporter in 2000 and became co-owner in 2001. She has filled in as editor when Wallis and later Mihalek took vacations.

A 1981 graduate of the master’s program at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Chiddister has also been an adjunct professor at Antioch University McGregor for the past 10 years, teaching writing classes. She received an Individual Artist Grant from the Ohio Arts Council in 2000 and 2002.