Krista and James Jahnke covered a dorm fire as their first assignment together at The State News.
A resident assistant had set fire to her curtains with a candle and caused “major damage” to her possessions March 2000.
“We screwed up because we promised the RA who set fire to her room that we wouldn’t use her name in the paper,” James said.
“We did? I don’t remember that,” Krista said.
They were chewed out by their editors, but the RA remained anonymous, James said.
Krista started working at The State News in January 2000 and James joined in March, but they had a class together that semester where they had already met through a mutual friend.
“I think we were really friends for the first year and just became really good friends,” Krista said. “Sometime in 2001, we started being more than friends.”
After 9/11 things progressed quickly.
“This is kind of hokey sounding but really we were both working at the paper during September 11,” Krista said. “I think after September 11 … you knew if you loved somebody the time is now. You don’t know how much time you have. Life is crazy, the world’s crazy. We should just get together.”
But, they kept their relationship on the “d-l” during the fall 2001 semester because she was his boss. Krista was the sports editor, and James was the hockey beat reporter.
“So we kept it on the d-l,” Krista said. “But I think that everyone at that time knew we were — it was kind of an open secret.”
They were on staff as a couple out in the open for three semesters.
“We just spent a lot of time together,” James said. “I mean you spend a lot of your free time, a lot of your discretionary time when you’re at The State News is spent on The State News. So, I mean we would sit together and work together and we would go to dinner together, because we were at The State News.”
Working with someone at The State News means you get to know them really quickly, Krista said.
“I think it really cements, it cements it because I think we have partial visibility of all different aspects of each other’s lives, so like our professional side, our social side, academic side,” Krista said. “You really just get to know someone as a full-rounded person in all the different ways and all the different sort of universes that they live in.”
Krista graduated in fall 2002 and James in spring 2003, and they both had jobs or internships in metro Detroit, which “made it easy.”
“I think a lot of journalists have to jump around the country to advance,” James said. “We’re, I guess, fortunate that we didn’t have to do that. We were able to both stay in Detroit.”
They got married in 2006 and have two children, Luke, 9, and JJ, 7.
“(The State News) was a special place, and I think it is still special to us,” Krista said.
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