Press and Journal, April 5

Lang named Press and Journal editor

By Pete Strella
P&J Staff

When Marlene Lang applied to become the new editor of the Press and Journal newspaper, she typed “The One” into the e-mail’s subject line.

“I knew I was what they were looking for when I read the ad,” Lang says. “I just had to convince [Press and Journal owners Joe & Louise Sukle] of that.”

She must have been convincing.

Lang, who has worked at daily and weekly newspapers as an editor and reporter, was soon hired as the publication’s new editor. She began work here on March 22.

“I liked that Joe and Louise wanted to have really good papers,” Lang says. “We were like-minded about what journalism is and how important it is [at the community level].”

Now the Wisconsin native is looking forward to finding out what makes the Middletown area unique. That understanding will come with time, she says.

Lang, 42, moved back to central Pennsylvania to be closer to her family. Her daughter Erin is expecting a child any day now. The baby will be Lang’s first grandchild.

“I returned for the baby,” Lang says. “You can’t miss that.”

She also has two sons, John and Jeremy, who attend Millersville University.

Lang grew up in Mayville, Wis., a small town among farms in the southeastern part of the Dairy State. After moving to Lancaster with her ex-husband Gregg in 1991, Lang graduated magna cum laude from Millersville University with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy.

Lang also minored in print journalism at Millersville and wrote a weekly column in The Snapper that drew plenty of fanfare.

“It was a humor column that dealt with social issues and politics,” Lang explained.

A calculus professor wrote her a now-cherished fan letter after her farewell column was published. She learned school administrators had promptly read the column each week to see what Lang would bring to light next. She had not realized the full impact of her column until that point.

“I still have the letter in my scrapbook,” Lang says.

After spending a decade at home with her children, then graduating college in 1998, Lang worked for The Columbia Ledger, The York Dispatch and The Lancaster New Era. In York, Lang was on the county government beat, which included York County Prison. The experience was formative in her career, building on her lifelong concern for social justice issues.

Lang explains the prison housed Immigration and Natural Services (INS) detainees, for whom the county received federal funds per diem; funds that undergird the county budget and have kept taxes down. “One commissioner called it their ‘hotel business,’” she recalled. “Many of these detainees are seeking political asylum. They’re disfigured from torture, not charged with crimes.”

The prison has expanded several times recently to accommodate INS detainees. As a reporter, Lang observed a conflict of inters “when human beings become a commodity.”

She remembers how guards worried about bringing diseases home to their families because of failures in processing prisoners.

“The temptation of pressure to bypass health and safety procedures is overwhelming; it’s almost inevitable that abuses will happen,” she says.

Lang returned to Wisconsin several years ago, where she wrote for a group of weekly papers before taking the court beat at the Portage Daily Register in Portage, Wis. She was promoted to editor of the paper, and her staff soon dubbed her the “prison maven,” as her interest and expertise on the subject followed her.

A year later, Lang was recruited as night city editor at The Daily Southtown in suburbs of Chicago, and where she also wrote a weekly column for the paper’s Insight section.

That column continues to be published Sundays in The Daily Southtown, which has a daily circulation of 50,000 readers.

“I’ll be writing here, too,” she said. “But I have to get to know the place and the people so I’ll know what I’m talking about. I don’t pretend to get it until I do.”

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