Steven Law has been named the new editor of the Lake Powell. The position became official on Dec. 23.

Law has been a reporter and feature writer at the Chronicle since Nov. 2014. He has been serving has interim editor since the departure of Editor/Publisher David Rupkalvis last October, who left so he could be closer to his parents in Texas.

“I was honored to be offered the position,” said Law, “and I’m looking forward to the challenges the position brings with it.

The position has already given Law several challenges, some of which were daunting. He has worked in journalism for 14 years, but only as a writer, he said. Prior to October he’d never paginated a newspaper and laying out his first newspaper was more challenging than he thought it would be. The paper that first week went to press an hour and a half late, but still arrived on time to the Chronicle’s readers the next morning.

“Some of our readers may recall that the second page of sports was missing completely and in its place we ran a wire story about quagga mussels in Lake Powell,” Law recalled. “I hope I can laugh about that sometime in the future.”

On the heels of that, long-time Chronicle reporter Jamie Brough also quit to pursue greener pastures in Phoenix leaving Law as the sole reporter and acting-editor. He was worried that he might be the Chronicle’s sole reporter for weeks or even months.

“I told my wife that I didn’t think Page had any journalists left in town,” said Law, “and I wasn’t optimistic of our chances of recruiting more from elsewhere.”

But he hired Paige Spowart a couple weeks later, and Kyla Rivas a week after that and he’s thrilled with the talent and stories they bring to the paper.

“I have to admit I was shocked when I found such a talented writer as Paige, and that it happened so quickly,” said Law, “and I was doubly shocked when it happened again with Kyla just a week later.

“I am really pleased with the quality of the content they’re contributing,” said Law.

Law has already implemented some changes at the Chronicle. The one he and the rest of the Chronicle staff are most excited about is adding a lot more local content. For the last few years the paper has had 12 to 14 pages, but that has been increased to 16 to 18 pages in recent weeks.

“The best part is that it’s all local stories,” said Law, “And from what we’re hearing so far, our readers like the change. We saw the departure of the old talent and the arrival of the new talent as a clean slate kind of moment. I think it re-invigorated us. When we added our new reporters, Paige and Kyla, to the team we knew it was going to be possible.”

Law knew he wanted to be a print journalist since he was 16 years old.  He graduated from Southern Utah University where he got his degree in journalism, with a minor in English. He started writing for The Daily Spectrum, a daily newspaper serving St. George and Cedar City, during his sophomore year.

“I did an internship with them spring quarter of my sophomore year,” said Law. “The next November they needed a part-time reporter and, since they knew my work, they hired me.”

Law worked for the Daily Spectrum from 1992 to 1994, at which time he took a job with the Salt Lake Tribune as their Southern Utah Correspondent, a job he kept until 1998.

Law has been an outdoor enthusiast his entire life. He grew up in Utah in a rural coal-mining and power plant town, which was also surrounded by amazing outdoor recreation opportunities. He grew up camping, fishing, and hunting deer and pheasant.

During his mid-twenties, Law combined his love for journalism with his love for tramping around outside and started writing outdoor articles for outdoor and travel magazines on a freelance basis. He quit his job at the Salt Lake Tribune in January 1998 to pursue freelance magazine writing full time.

“I had worked hard for several years to build a working relationship with numerous outdoor travel magazines and by 1998 I thought I was ready to go,” Law recalls. “I had enough writing gigs set up to keep me employed and paid for the next five months, and that first five months was pretty great.

“Most of what I was writing involved adventure travel, so I did a lot of mountain biking, hiking, fishing, et cetera. And when I’d get home I’d spend my days writing adventure stories. It was so great! I was living the dream!

“But that’s also exactly when the bottom fell out of print media. The internet took over. I remember so many new travel magazines came out on line, because you could basically do it for free, with zero overhead. At first it seemed very exciting to have all these new writing outlets but we all learned pretty quickly that they didn’t pay their travel writers. Most of them still don’t.

“And all that free, online content also killed journalism. By the end of 1998 more than half of the print magazines I had written for the first half of the year were out of business.”

With his income suddenly reduced to a trickle, Law called his former editor at the Salt Lake Tribune and asked for his old job back, but was informed that there was no old job to return to. The same thing that had happened to the print magazines had also happened to the Tribune. In the year Law was gone they’d laid off about 25 percent of their staff writers. Law’s former editor was now working as a reporter doing Law’s old job.

From 1998 to 2005 Law left mainstream journalism but continued freelance writing for the few remaining outdoor travel magazines. But the freelance work wasn’t enough to pay the bills.

“I did it because I loved doing it,” said Law. “They all paid terribly.”

It was a magazine assignment for a magazine called Hooked on the Outdoors that first brought Law to Page. The magazine hired him to go on a week-long Grand Canyon river trip with Wilderness River Adventures.

“That trip completely changed my life,” Law said. “I loved everything about it. The beauty of the canyon, the tranquility of camping on a beach in the bottom of the canyon with its mile-high walls rising around us, the adventure of navigating some of the world’s best whitewater. I couldn’t stop thinking about that trip.”

The next spring, in April 2005, Wilderness River Adventures (WRA) hired him to be a boatman, a job he held for eight seasons.

“I absolutely loved that job and that time of my life,” Law said. “For six months out of the year the Grand Canyon was my home. Not too many people can say that. My four years in college was the best period of my life, but my eight years as a Grand Canyon river guide were a close second.”

But after eight years as a guide, Law was ready to move on.

“After eight years as a guide I had reached the point where doing a river trip no longer felt special,” he said. “And I was really missing journalism. I wanted to do more than just freelance and dabble around. I wanted all the way back in as a career.”

But the river had one more gift to bestow on him before he left. On one of his final river trips he met Dana Crane, the woman who would become his wife a year later.

“It was one of the most serendipitous moments of my life,” he said.

Having been out of the journalism loop for so long it took him a while to get back in. It happened in a roundabout way. Law applied for a reporter position at an NPR station in Salt Lake. They weren’t hiring but the NPR editor knew an editor at KSL.com (KSL TV’s online news source) who was hiring freelance writers with the intent of bringing them on full time.

Law posted his first story with them in July of 2012 and thereafter published one or two stories a week with them. A year later he began writing a weekly science column for them called “Curious Things” and in the meantime he married Dana Crane and rented an apartment in Page.

In Oct. 2013 Law founded KSL.com’s outdoor page, and also became its editor.

“It looked good on my resume but it paid terribly and didn’t come with insurance,” Law said. “By then, my wife and I were talking about having kids. I really needed a job with insurance. So one night I sat down and pin-pointed the weak spots in my resume. They were pretty obvious. I didn’t know how to use Photoshop or InDesign. It was going to be difficult for me to get hired into a legit news organization without those skills on my resume.”

Law went to the Lake Powell Chronicle for help.

“I talked to Tonja Greenfield, the editor at the time,” Law said. “I suggested that I write some freelance stories for the Chronicle and in exchange they teach me how to use Photoshop and InDesign.”

About a month later Tonja came back with a better offer.

“I was in Sedona with my wife when she called and offered me a job as a staff writer,” Law said. “l have to admit, my first impression was to tell her `Thanks, but no thanks,’ The Chronicle seemed like small potatoes to me. I was trying to parlay my position as Outdoor Editor for KSL.com, which has a larger readership than the New York Times, into something bigger. Or, at least, more glamorous. But I said, `Yes,’ because they paid more than my KSL job, they offered insurance, and they’d teach me how to use Photoshop and InDesign.

“At the time I accepted the job it seemed like a step backward in my career, but now, looking back, I see it was a huge step forward.”

Law began his career with the Chronicle in Nov. 2014.

“I’ve written a lot of my best work since that date,” he said. “I didn’t know it at the time I was hired, but the Chronicle is the perfect platform for the type of material I write. I am so glad I took that job.”

As Law takes the helm of the Chronicle he wants its readers to know he’s taking his duty as editor seriously.

“Page has this reputation of being a sleepy little tourist town,” Law said. “In many regards, that’s true. Ultimately our job [at the Chronicle] is to safeguard our community from corruption, whether its city officials, police or other entities. We’re fortunate that our officers and officials on all levels also love Page, and seem to be working to put its best interests first.

“Our second goal at the Chronicle is to be the cheerleader and storyteller of our town and its residents,” said Law. “Our town and its people have a lot of great stories to tell, and we really enjoy sharing them with the rest of the town.”