Edgerley, Susan

After graduating from Kansas State University in 1976 with a double major in English and journalism, I worked at Kansas newspapers for almost a decade. I tell K-State students my Kansas education and experience prepared me for a career that led me to The New York Times.

I wrote for my junior high paper, my high school paper and The Collegian at K-State. My best education came in the newsroom of The Collegian. Our advisor was Bill Brown, who would regale us with tales of Truman Capote in Kansas to report the story that became In Cold Blood. Pete Souza was a photographer, not too long before he became White House photographer for Ronald Reagan. I couldn’t get hired on The Collegian staff at first; not until Scott Kraft gave me a job as a copy editor. Now he’s editor at large for enterprise journalism at The Los Angeles Times.

After graduation, I went to work as a reporter at The Arkansas City Traveler (now the Cowley Courier Traveler). A couple of years later, I was hired as a reporter at The Wichita Beacon, before it became The Wichita Eagle-Beacon, and now, simply, The Wichita Eagle. I met my husband, Lon Teter, in the Eagle newsroom and moved to the Philadelphia Daily News as an assistant city editor in 1985, a year after he moved to The Philadelphia Inquirer. We were married in 1986.

I was hired at as a copy editor The New York Times in 1989, and over the next three decades I worked in jobs including metropolitan editor, assistant managing editor for integrating the print and web newsrooms, executive editor for The New York Times News Service and dining editor.

On 9-11, I was deputy metro editor. It was the first day of middle school for my son, Jack. My daughter, Nora, was 4. She and our babysitter went to a park in our Brooklyn neighborhood that morning but returned soon after; the ash drifting across the East River from the fires at the Twin Towers was too thick.

For those of us on the metro desk, 9-11 was a local story. A local story of global importance, but local nonetheless.  Throughout my career, I covered the city I lived in and loved. And New York City is easy to love.

I was far from the smartest person in the newsroom of The Times; far from the most talented. What I brought was much the same of what I brought to newsrooms in Ark City, Wichita and Philadelphia. They are Kansas qualities: A commitment to work hard. A desire to do well. Curiosity; in this case, about the cities I lived and worked in. Plus a healthy dose of outrage and a healthy dose of empathy – but not too much of either.

I retired in 2017 and returned to K-State as a professional in residence up until the time of Covid. These days, I’m on the board of Trust Women, a non-profit that operates abortion clinics in Wichita and Oklahoma City, and I help administer K-State’s Edgerley-Franklin Leadership Scholarship, which looks to honor and aid students of color and those who are the first in their families to go to college. We recently moved to  Ashland, OR; for the steelhead and the Shakespeare, my husband says.