Note to Dakota: We have headshots of everyone below except for Mike Maple
Nearly all of the Tiger Rag/Helmsman staff have gone on to successful careers both in journalism and other fields, but our successful newspaper alums also include politicians, best selling novelists, national magazine editors, corporate executives, prominent photographers, and TV & radio stars. Quite frankly, we could fill a whole book with all our successful former staffers. Please forgive us if your favorite is not among the following.
• Angie Craig won her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018 in Minnesota’s 2nd congressional district and was re-elected in 2020. She was a reporter and editor at the Helmsman from 2000-2002, and after graduating, worked as a reporter at the Commercial Appeal before working for 22 years at two medical device companies, one a Memphis-based division of an international business, before moving to Minnesota to work for a U.S. Fortune 500 company as an executive for corporate communications, investor relations, government affairs and health policy. During the last four years, she has also been head of global human resources.
How has your experience at the Helmsman helped you in your career?
“I learned to listen as a reporter at The Daily Helmsman. That's the job now — to listen to my constituents and work with everyone. Also, managing a bunch of college colleagues to put out a newspaper four days a week is still the toughest management job I've ever had. Great experience.”
• Johanna Edwards is the best selling author of the novel, The Next Big Thing. She has published three books with Penguin Random House and two books with Simon & Schuster. She was an arts and entertainment writer and editor at the Helmsman from fall 1998 every semester until she graduated in December 2001. “I’m pretty sure I would have stayed there forever if they’d let me, LOL,” she wrote.
How has your experience at the Helmsman helped you in your career?
“I learned so many valuable lessons during my time there, but what stands out the most is how the Helmsman instilled in me what it means to write under pressure and always complete your assignment by deadline. It’s important to see writing as an actual, structured process as opposed to some lofty creative process that’s reliant on a muse.”
• Julia Pananon Weeks is a social media producer and photo editor for Associated Press Images, the world’s largest collection of historical and contemporary photos.
After graduating in 2006, Julia moved to New York for a photography internship at Newsday. In the months that followed, she worked as a photo editor at Wire Image and as a photographer for the New Jersey Nets (now Brooklyn Nets) before landing a photo editor job at The Associated Press in 2007. While a student at the UofM, she had worked various stints as a photographer and reporter at the Helmsman from 2002 to 2006. Some of Julia’s fondest memories were made in the Helmsman newsroom and on the basketball court, photographing her favorite team, the Memphis Tigers. During the 2005-2006 season, she traveled to Oakland, Calif., to photograph the top-seeded Tigers defeat Bradley in a March Madness Sweet 16 game. She’s got her fingers crossed for a repeat this season.
How has your experience at the Helmsman helped you in your career?
“My experience at the Helmsman taught me that words matter, stories matter and that journalism is a catalyst for change. I once wrote an article about the inaccessible restrooms in the Meeman Journalism Building after my best friend who uses a wheelchair wasn’t able to use the facilities. After the article went to print, updates to the bathrooms were made. Another lesson learned was to nurture relationships with colleagues. It’s always better to warm call than cold call. As a result of my long-standing friendship with the University of Memphis Athletic Media Relations, I was able to secure a press pass to photograph my beloved Tigers at Madison Square Garden in New York. “
• Lindsay Goldenberg Jones’ first summer internship was at Reader’s Digest magazine — a publication with a huge circulation, but not exactly a magazine that gets a college girl excited. It was very popular with older people, however. But Lindsay did get excited because she knew it was a first step toward the magazine career she wanted so badly. Because Lindsay was/is tall and beautiful, she was constantly told she ought to be a fashion model, but nothing was further from her career goals. In fact, she found it annoying when people said she should be a model. Her next internship took her back to New York, but this time to Rolling Stone, arguably the magazine that a college student would most want to work for. After graduation, she worked at Rolling Stone, Teen People, and was senior editor at Maxim.com. She founded the website, WomanGettingMarried.com and co-hosts The Woman Getting Married Podcast.
How has your experience at the Helmsman helped you in your career?
There are so many things I have taken from my time at the Helmsman that I still use to this day. Aside from learning how important it is to surround yourself with leaders you trust and who allow you to grow, I also learned how to wear many hats.
I started as a reporter at the Helmsman, but then also worked as the paper's designer for a semester. After that I was able to combine both of those skills as Editor in Chief, where I oversaw the paper's editorial as well as a redesign. During my time at the Helmsman I felt safe and encouraged to make big decisions (and mistakes), and this in turn has given me the confidence to make big decisions in my own career. After working for major publishers for over a decade in New York City and Los Angeles, I decided to take a leap of faith and go out on my own to launch my website, WomanGettingMarried.com. It is here that I am able to harken back to my Helmsman days, taking everything I've learned from editorial to design, while still hearing those encouraging voices from the amazing team at the Helmsman. I owe everything to my experience there.
Mike Maple is a photographer and photojournalist well known for his documentary photography, who worked part-time at the Memphis Press-Scimitar while he was a student at Memphis State. By the age of 20, he was assigned by Newsweek to cover the 1976 presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan. By the time he was 21 he was a full-time professional photographer working for Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, People and European news magazines. He returned to Memphis and worked for 24 years as a staff photographer at the Commercial Appeal.
Amulya Malladi’s first book, A Breath of Fresh Air, was published by Ballantine Books/The Random House Publishing Group in 2002, and she has since had seven more novels published and her ninth one, Sinnerman, just sold to HarperCollins/William Morrow and will be published in Winter 2022. She is also Senior Director, Global Marketing at Danaher (Beckman Coulter Diagnostics)
How has your experience at the Helmsman helped you in your career?
“I learned how to write at The Daily Helmsman. Dr. Elinor Grusin, Danny Linton, Candy Justice, Kimberly Rogers and Matt Wilson held my hand and made a young woman from India feel at home in Memphis. But most importantly, these wonderful coaches, teachers and guides taught me how to tell a story. They also helped me make one of the biggest, most impactful and first decisions of my young life. I'm so glad that I had the courage and the support of the Helmsman team to move from the graduate program in biomedical engineering to journalism, where my heart was. I have never looked back. Learning how to tell a story helped me have a career in marketing and become a bestselling author.”
William and Caleb Suggs are brothers who founded the Memphis-based film production company Studio Suggs, which released its first official film, “Homeboys Haunted 2,” a horror-comedy short film. Caleb has previously had two short films
shown at Indie Memphis. He and William are both graduates of the University of Memphis, where Caleb was executive producer of Tiger News and on-air personality with radio stations WUMR and WYXR. They both worked at the Daily Helmsman — Caleb as a reporter and photographer and William as a freelance sports photographer. William, who also got his master’s degree from UofM, was a graduate teaching assistant giving instruction on multi-media storytelling. Caleb in 2021 won first place nationally in the prestigious Hearst Journalism Awards Audio and Features competition.
How has your experience at the Helmsman helped you in your career?
Working at the Daily Helmsman, in many ways, served as my introduction to real collegiate journalism and was an integral part of the triad of extracurricular organizations -- alongside Tiger News and WUMR -- that would help pave the way to the career I have now. I wrote freelance for the DH during my first semester back in Fall 2017.
That newsroom was something special. As a freshman just looking for a way to chase my dreams and start my career, being in that space was fresh and invigorating, almost as much as holding your own printed work in your hands. I still remember the rush of exhilaration I got the day I unexpectedly walked up to a campus news stand to see only the second print story I had ever written on the front page of the paper. I still have several copies of it at home. It was a piece on the Student Ambassador Board's Annual Mudball Tournament which I simultaneously made into a broadcast news package for Tiger News -- a juggling act I'd quickly become accustomed to and apply to the rest of my career.
I would become an official Helmsman staff writer in Spring 2018 (my first college paycheck I might add) and stayed on for another semester after. Working at the DH for those three semesters not only allowed me to meet some talented journalists and great people in the department who still influence me today, but it also gave me one of the strongest foundations in journalistic writing that I could have ever hoped to get so early on in college. Put that together with what I was able to do with Tiger News and WUMR, and I ended up telling any array of stories and getting a plethora of experiences that would make me a powerhouse in journalism and strategic media as I applied myself to incoming jobs and opportunities.
Though journalism in and of itself is no longer my primary focus, one valuable thing hasn't changed. I still tell stories. I still convey to others the words, the arcs, the images, the emotions that impact them and get them thinking, get them doing. Working in a print newsroom may have been a far different environment than a movie set or TV studio, but at the end of the day (as long as you have integrity) that core is still the same...At least it is for me.
• Gary Parrish is a sports columnist for CBS Sports.com; studio analyst and sideline reporter for CBS Sports Network; host of The Gary Parrish Show on ESPN radio in Memphis; and host of CBS Sports’ Eye on College Basketball Podcast. He was sports editor of the Helmsman from 1997 until 1999.
How has your experience at the Helmsman helped you in your career?
“I often tell people the hardest I ever worked might’ve been when I was at Memphis and working at The Daily Helmsman. I’d wake up every day, go to class, and then on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, head straight to the journalism building, where I’d often stay until after midnight. I took real pride in what I was doing. And it was in those years, I sincerely believe, that I created a work ethic that fast-tracked my career. I didn’t have the best GPA. I wasn’t even close to the best student. But I had reported and written so much, for so many different publications, and completed multiple internships, that by the time I graduated I was hired by the Commercial Appeal directly out of college. From there, it’s almost entirely just been one good opportunity after another. I get paid to write, to talk on national television, to host a radio show in my hometown, to host a podcast for a major network. It’s more than I ever imagined I’d get to do. And it all started inside the Edward J. Meeman Journalism Building. That's where I learned how to work — plus made lifelong friends and memories.”
The reader has surely noticed by now that there are no newspaper editors on our list. That is because so many Tiger Rag/Helmsman alumni have gone on to lead newspapers that we could not possibly choose from among them. We also confined our list to living alumni, but are grateful to all who came before us.
