My life as a journalist frequently is a lone wolf venture. I go into a flock, try to mix in while conspicuously different from everyone else, and observe as closely as I can. I might pick up a scent, I may well howl or growl, less often even bite. Metaphorically, of course. A story is something you track down, hunt. Even the sweet features.

But I ran in packs through the bulk of my 20s. Firefighting largely is a team sport. I looked at it as sport, anyway, with all the elements of competition with the fire, other crews, crewmates, self.

I grew up playing team sports, mainly baseball and basketball. One year in junior high, my last chance, I weighed a pound over the minimum and had my lone season in organized football through Pop Warner.

Mostly, though, I had to settle for playing basketball as if football, more than one coach remarked. Not in praise.

Baseball dropped off because I couldn’t hit. But I tackled basketball well enough to top out as the only one on my varsity team shorter than 6 feet. I only played because I was the ultimate hustle monkey, and I kept our star player, the league co-MVP, fed with passes and covered the best perimeter player on the other team. In summer league, a point of pride, I fouled the crap out of a guy who went on to the NBA, a 6-5 guard in high school.

I was a better wildland firefighter, built like an actual wire-lean sled dog, able to chip away forever on the line, and apparently I had the right instincts for the work. It helped that most of us had been athletes. One member of the crew before my time had been a No. 1 draft pick in Major League Baseball. Hurt his arm.

Hotshot crews of 20 become ultimate teams through fire seasons, always traveling, in a sense always competing. At least that’s how I viewed it: The lowest form of professional sports. Others looked at it as paramilitary service, or more realistically, grunt work beating dirt with occasional excitement and very little sleep. People who’d been sent to prison did this stuff. There’s perspective.

I was good at it, I think. I could hang individually. I could read fire, had a natural feel for tactics, strategies. I could match talent to positions, lineups, keep a squad or a crew plugging along. I did my homework, especially with investigative reports about fatalities on the fireline. Knowing I inevitably would face what I read about had a way of keeping my attention.

So it’s probably not a complete surprise I got to run one of two squads that make up the full hotshot crew as a seasonal, which was unheard of then. This was a bigger deal to me, looking back, than any editor or publisher gig after that. Never mind this came at the tail end of what turned out to be my last season on the crew.

Then I literally came out of the woods into journalism. I joke that I could barely type when I began this career as a cub reporter, my first assignment to take a picture and write up “Pet of the Week” from the pound. Somehow, I convinced my wife to pick up that gentle, soulful puppy, which turned out to be anything but. The little hell hound tore a couch to shreds one night while we were out for a movie.

The much harder adjustment was going out alone into always foreign territory and coming back to report on those forays, also alone, or if not exactly alone, not cheek to jowl on a fireline, either. There’s no running in a pack with this work, White House press corps jokes aside.

It took a long time to get used to. Newsrooms do develop team-like cultures, let’s say, with shared pressures imposed by deadlines and breaking stories that share a lot with initial attack on a running fire. More than most jobs, I’d say. But nothing will match a season on a hotshot crew. I was spoiled, forged.

I love this work, love my colleagues. We share the struggle and joys of getting our stories online and performing the symphony required for print editions, everyone expertly (one hopes) playing our parts.

There’s no “but” coming here. I knew the pack and had an ache to break away. Then I ran largely alone and missed the pack. I know these instincts are simply part of being human, our need for belonging rivaling our need for individual expression, to make a difference.

Which leaves me at heart that oxymoron, the lone wolf.

Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached atdrogers@parkrecord.comor (970) 376-0745.

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I’m guessing I’m healthier for my attention to social media dropping to near zero and oddly, perhaps, better at my work.

I snipped the cord fully with cable news after a few last experiments toggling between FOX and CNN in fall 2016. Outrage is not information, emotions stoked not the same as gaining perspective. There I found ashes for news value. Can’t say I miss the hot air.

So my diet is down to comparative nuts and berries: Some NPR when I drive, newspapers and magazines online, an eye on KPCW and Town Lift. And books, lots of books, though those give insight into the news rather than carrying news themselves.

The last time I paid close attention to local television news was in the late 1990s while night editor at The North County Times in northern San Diego County. We had nine zones and served a population of 2 million with two presses that each stood three stories tall. We were pretty big, 100th largest in the nation, but still very junior to The Union-Tribune.

In our daily 2 p.m. news meetings we were meticulous with our page one planning for each zone and metro front. Around 7, maybe 8 or later, I’d nearly always tear all that up after seeing what the local stations were reporting. Stories they had that we needed to jump on. Stories we got to push up because they didn’t have ’em. There was also national and sometimes world news breaking like surf on the wire services to consider.

We’d have to wait to see each morning what The U-T had in its northern zones, along with Riverside’s Press-Enterprise. Newspaper competition then was a marathon, though not so different than watching KPCW and Town Lift and trying to maximize our strengths and mitigate weaknesses accordingly, only more in real time.

In the smaller communities and ski towns we’d keep a looser eye on the metros and the national outlets. Mainly our attention was local, especially if we competed with another daily or weekly. Television news became less of a thing, and local radio a bit more.

Now it’s all online in terms of competitive footing. Amid the resulting digital froth and fragmentation, having a clear identity has only risen in importance for news organizations, as well.

For The Park Record, that means focusing locally. Once upon a time, the little town papers tried to include a bit of everything in each edition, before everything was only a click or swipe away.

In a sense, I burned the boats behind us when I landed here. No more Associated Press to fill out the report if we ran short with our own resources. I did hedge, though, working out an arrangement with The Salt Lake Tribune much like the Colorado papers with The Denver Post to run some of their stories when appropriate, and vice versa if they should see fit.

So maybe not all the boats, then. Still, we’re aiming beyond the traditional “local first” of community papers to local only.

Local means the geographic community, of course. It also means issues of greater interest to this local community that other ski towns share. Things like housing, costliness, traffic, quality of life, climate trends, skiing.

Social media, like the gossip channels of yore, provides its own flood of potential insight into news, I know. The online grapevine bears multiples more than what we could get in person at the bar, the grocery store, the kids’ ball games. But underneath the froth, it’s all the same ol’, same ol’, whitewater unchanging.

I get away with or benefit from my bookish ways because we have people willing to fish the digital streams for the story-worthy bits. This is just the world they swim in, which has risen around nearly all of us.

Still, while the products of journalism often go on social media, journalism itself is not social media. I suspect we may even be foolish posting there, a venue based far more on personal expression than vetted information. Gossip and news are fundamentally different, serving different ends. So why are we commingling “content” and thereby confusing one for the other?

Yes, I know why. It’s where click bait and obsession with audience, any audience, come from in my calling, neglecting the important question: what audience?

The more thoughtful among a citizenry gravitates to journalism. The work alone attracts a better educated, wealthier and more civic-minded audience. I don’t see a truly compelling reason to preen for distracted, addled scrollers fooled by posing, sensation, outrage and roiling streams of nonsense.

So I do turn to literature for insight more helpful to my work than Instagram or X, FOX or CNN. I just don’t find answers there. Not the right ones, anyway.

Don Rogers is the editor of The Park Record. He can be reached at drogers@parkrecord.com or (970) 376-0745.

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