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DAY NEWSROOM: Production Manager

Scott Ritter

Production Manager
s.ritter@theday.com

Phone: (860) 701-4388

The Day’s production manager seems quiet and unassuming. On a normal day, you can find Scott Ritter in front of the glowing screen of his computer, creating a map or pulling together all kinds of visual elements with text to build a page for the Night & Day or Sunday business sections. He attended what is now Texas State University – LBJ’s alma mater is its claim to fame, Scott will tell you – for history and political science. One of his classes required him to regularly read The New York Times and he found himself hooked. His academic papers took on a journalistic tone. He began to dream of going overseas as a reporter. But “real life got in the way of that,” he says. Nevertheless, he’s done a lot of uprooting. His first newspaper job was with the Pine Bluff Commercial in Arkansas. From there, he transferred to Southern California, where he happened to be when the Rodney King riots took place. One day, he and a roommate decided to give their notice and drive all the way to Washington, D.C. There, Scott ended up working for the Wall Street Journal, writing stories on everything from anti-trust and other regulatory agencies to the Supreme Court. He also worked for the Dow Jones News Service and other wire services. His work kept him traveling and, for a time, transferred him back down to Texas. Eventually, he left that tumultuous life to settle down with his family here in southeastern Connecticut, where his wife grew up. He has been here ever since. “I love it here, I love the water,” he says, though there’s one main drawback: “I’m not a big fan of winter.” Still, he considers himself lucky for landing at The Day. “I really like my job, which seems really kind of rare,” he says, laughing. He knew nothing about design when he started as a copy editor here 15 years ago, so he had to learn pagination on the fly. It suited him; he likes “solving problems, design, coming up with something different and appealing to readers, and working with stories and art.” His time on the copy desk has been punctuated by stints as a casino reporter and serving as the wire editor. Today, he is the liaison between the newsroom and The Day’s advertising department, overseeing how much space is in each edition of the newspaper and paginating when needed. Never one to stagnate, he has dabbled in learning several programs, taught himself map-making and is teaching himself graphic design. “‘Dabble’ is the word,” he says. “Things move so fast, it’s sometimes hard to know where to put your resources and what to learn. … Things become obsolete so fast.” When he’s not in the newsroom, you can find Scott reading books, listening to music or “puttering around the house trying to fix things – not always successfully,” he adds. He also spends time with his wife and two children.