More Stories By Ron Ross

Ron Ross' first job was as a newspaper delivery boy for the Omaha World Herald in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He earned his first byline front-page story as a writer for his high school newspaper. While in high school, he served as a Citizen Journalist by reporting all of his high school sports scores to a local radio station. After high school, he entered college and graduated from Nebraska Christian College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1965. He pastored church in Kansas, and then took his wife and two children to Zambia (in central Africa) for seven years of in-service to his denomination as a missionary.

Upon return to the United States he pastored churches in Nebraska, Texas and Colorado. He completed work for a Master of Divinity Degree at Creighton University and a Doctor of Theology degree at Biblical Life College & Seminary.

He wrote the book, Your Family Heritage, a Guide to Preserving Family History, which was considered one of the seminal resources for oral history taking. He has lectured often on the subject for the Colorado Historical Society.

He has written numerous articles for a variety of periodicals, been a columnist for his county newspaper and active in his community in a variety of ways. He published several official football annuals for major universities and was the editor/publisher of Business Trend Magazine.

More recently, he was the owner of Tidbits of Douglas County (Colorado), an entertainment weekly that he sold after 12 years as owner/publisher. While a Tidbits publisher he served as the "Dean" of Tidbits University, a three-day program that teaches new publishers how to publish a successful Tidbits paper in their communities. Dr. Ross wrote the training program and taught new Tidbits publishers for several years. He continues to participate in each Tidbits University as a guest lecturer. He writes a weekly motivational/inspirational column that is published in several papers and was repurposed as a brief motivational video and posted on YouTube.

Dr. Ross is now the publisher of Tidbits of Greeley, Colorado. He lives in Loveland, Colorado.

In 2008, Dr. Ross saw the need for local communities to have their own on-line newspapers so he began investigating a variety of ways that could be accomplished. He decided that skilled citizen journalists were needed to make such a website successful. He came up with the idea of a series of low-cost webinars that citizens could take to learn the fundamentals of researching, interviewing and writing articles about local news and features. The idea took on a life of its own when his vision was expanded to the National Association of Citizen Journalists.

He shared this vision with Susan Cormier, a former newspaper reporter and editor who he had come to know and whose talents he recognized by working with her in a local networking group. Together, they created the National Association of Citizen Journalists. They visualize a vibrant nationwide (potentially worldwide) organization that recruits, trains and motivates citizens to write, produce and publish news about their local communities.