Having spent nearly half of her life working for the Tennessean, Knight Stivender, who is currently the newspaper's senior editor for niche and digital content, said the publication feels more like home to her than anything else.

"I was 17 when I started here, and I'm 31 right now," she said. "There's lots of good people here who I feel helped raise me."

Senior editor for niche and digital content

While her official title is kind of a "mouthful," Stivender says that what she basically does as senior editor ranges from taking charge of all the niche sections, such as lifestyles & entertainment coverage, to managing specialty websites like nashvilleweddings.com, tennesseegreen.com, nashvilleshopping.com, tuneinmusiccity.com and tennesseantravel.com. Adding to all that, Stivender said she manages a really small team of developers who, among other things, build Web sites for the paper and manage the home page.

"I'm a Mac person, so I love multimedia and I love doing it myself," she said.

But she does have a favorite tool of the moment: Twitter.

"I use it for everything! I use it to keep in the loop with what my friends are doing and to keep in the loop with what the industry is doing." Plus she said it's a great tool for marketing and pushing The Tennessean's content out to the public. She also tries her hand at video, photography, Facebook and blogging through WordPress. "I don't do LinkedIn yet, and I was too old when MySpace came out," she said.

How it all happened

Stivender's said her love for writing started when she was a little girl with big dreams of becoming a writer. From that point it progressed into freelancing for the Tennessean while she was attending high school in Mount Juliet, Tenn. Then on her very first day at UT, Stivender joined the Daily Beacon staff.

"I was managing editor, design editor, government editor, special products editor. Pretty much the only thing I wasn't was the editor-editor." All the while she still found time to write for the Tennessean, which, upon graduation, is exactly where she wound up.

Proudest moment

Before her promotion to senior editor, Stivender, served as online director for Tennessean.com. She said morphing the newspaper's site into the multimedia and user-interactive entity it is today tops her achievement list.

"When I became the online director, Tennessean.com was pretty much just the print newspaper put on the Web site overnight. But we've turned it into more of a real Web site."

That love for online content carried over to her current position, but Stivender said quality is not defined by the "where," it's all about the "what."

"I think that it is the content that is important, not the paper or the Web site, frankly," she said. "News is always going to be relevant and useful and much in demand whether it's in that old newspaper or in your cell phoneNews is always going to be relevant and useful and much in demand whether it's in that old newspaper or in your cell phone... -Knight Stivender, your blackberry, your Web site, your browser, your Google reader or whatever."

And while Knight said she loves being able to do a little bit of everything at work, in the future she would love to branch out even more.

"I like the business of our business. It's just interesting to me to see how we're going to pursue making money in the future." Plus she is currently working on writing her first book, an experience she documents on her blog, First Book.

Be a hybrid

The next generation of journalists must possess a variety of different skill sets to survive in the media industry, Stivender said.

"You have to understand business as much as you understand journalism, and you have to possess many different media skills. It's not just recording a story, writing it and going home. I've had 14 years to learn all those things, but (upcoming journalists) have to learn it right this second."

Stivender produced this video for Tennessean.com to mark New Years 2009.