Juggernaut juggler: Lynn Kalber, JM 1978, juggles the origami she created in The Palm Beach Post newsroom she helps run. (Photo courtesy of The Palm Beach Post)
juggling act
Renaissance woman
Visiting The Palm Beach Post, you might confuse Lynn Kalber, JM 1978, with adaptable actress Meryl Streep. The paper’s director of administration / newsroom plays so many roles so convincingly, she just might catch Hollywood’s attention.
Take, for instance, her latest task – co-heading the implementation of a new editorial computer system. Although Kalber once oversaw the department’s tech support and recently trained to train her colleagues, she never studied IT (information technology). Yet you wouldn’t know it by the way she deftly fields questions from staffers awestruck by the Mac OS X operating system or the Adobe InDesign layout program.
Okay, so Kalber’s a quick study. But really, why did the paper’s management – which has been changing since Editor Eddie Sears, JM 1967, retired in January – ask her to co-lead this effort?
“Because she’s an extremely versatile, talented editor,” said her boss, new Managing Editor Bill Rose. “It’s unusual to have somebody with both technical and editing talent.”
A Trump-caliber troubleshooter, Kalber navigates the new landscape with a keen eye, a patient disposition and a firm grip on her role.
“My co-chair is an expert on the technical side,” she said. “My strengths are advance planning and getting large projects done with the cooperation of all the departments.”
She’s also often asked to handle the unexpected, said Rose, with whom she meets every morning.
“When I have a problem in the newsroom, I frequently turn to her,” he said. “If it falls in the category of news, I go to a department head; but if the unknown suddenly flies up, I ask Lynn to make sense of it.”
As part of her “ever-morphing” job, Kalber also produces the newsroom’s monthly newsletter, hires interns, and develops the editorial department budget.
“It’s lots of fun to do with that many commas,” she said, noting the budgeting process usually takes four months.
She also handles odds and ends. For instance, just before she interviewed for this article, she sat down with a chef to select a menu for a Cox Newspapers meeting at the Post ’s West Palm Beach building. And she serves as an interior designer of sorts, continuously refitting an expanding staff into an established space. That same morning, she met with an office planner to discuss demolishing a wall.
To ward off the Fort Lauderdale-based Sun-Sentinel, which last year launched a campaign into central and northwestern Palm Beach County, the Post has been relentlessly recruiting reporters.
“This is what happens in a competitive environment,” Kalber said. “I love it.”
She’s been educating editors on the art of “squeezing more talent” into the newsroom to allow her to slowly step away from this role.
She recently dropped a couple of other favorite tasks: editing the food section and recruiting (she kept interns). Yet, she’s already thinking about the next thing. Nothing major – just a little something on the side to keep her challenged. Last year, she oversaw the publication of a staff-written-and-photographed book documenting the effects of the record four hurricanes that slammed Florida.
“We lost a bureau in one of the hurricanes,” she recalled. “We had reporters working out of cars with wireless cards. We rented an RV.”
She keeps quiet about the details of her next extra project, saying only it may be a new page in the features section. “I’m probably shooting myself in the foot. But [unlike editing the food section] it won’t require supervising staff, so it should be less time consuming.”
Kalber keeps busy outside the newsroom, as well. At the joint meeting of the College’ s four advisory councils last month, she became chair of the Department of Journalism Advisory Council. The position entails, among other tasks, overseeing meetings with students and faculty to deliver feedback and recommendations to Dean Terry Hynes and department Chair William McKeen .
“Lynn is terrific to work with,” said council immediate past chair Kevin Walsh, chief of bureau for Florida for the Associated Press. “She’s extremely dedicated. She’s one of the hardest working members of the council. She takes her service very seriously and obviously feels passionately about education at UF.”
At home, Kalber and her husband Scott Eyman, the Post ’s books editor, take care of three dogs and a cat. They met at the Sun-Sentinel . During her seven years there, she worked as a features writer, designer, features copy desk chief and assistant features editor. Eyman wrote for the paper’s now defunct Sunday magazine, Sunshine, alongside their friend Michael Connelly, JM 1980 (see story, Page 8).
Kalber and Eyman married 19 years ago, while she was on a two-year break from journalism, running the American office for the British firm Flying Flowers. “It was fun working for a company that produced a quality product,” she said. “And I traveled to England.”
Now she travels with Eyman, often in search of material and information for his books on silent films and talkies. In the fall, they may visit Paris. That is, if she can get away.
The one constant in her job is that it’s never constant. In her first six years at the Post, the last two of which she served as entertainment editor, Kalber played more traditional, structured roles. But she prefers her current position’s eclectic excitement and she plans to stick with it. She has no designs on her boss’ job.
“I would never want to be the managing editor,” she said. “A lot of the fun goes out of the job at that point. I like the flexibility of my job. In 12 years, I’ve done amazing projects. I would never have had the time to do them otherwise. I’m down on the floor running the machinery.”
—Boaz Dvir
