Sarah Brown
Kristy Tallman, of Lebanon, joins The New Era as its newest reporter, replacing Ethan Hoagland, who took up a television news job in Portland. She started at the end of December 2023.
Her goal for The New Era is to make sure everybody gets the news they want to read, she said.
“News is so different and it means different things to different people at different ages,” she explained. “That’s one of the things that I hope we can achieve at The New Era, that we spread that news across all ages, where everybody can enjoy what we’re writing.”
Essentially originating from Chester, Va. a small-town city just south of Richmond, Tallman grew up in a “regular, ordinary” neighborhood in what would be considered the suburbs of Chesterfield County. She likens her hometown to the Lebanon-Sweet Home area, a city tucked between the metropolis and a more rural area of the county.
Tallman has been writing since she was a child, some 40 or 50 years ago.
“Part of my writing came from my dreams because I had nightmares every night,” she explained. “Part of the way that I would get rid of those dreams from rattling my brain like they would is I would write about them.”
The dreams stopped – in fact, all dreams stopped – after she underwent surgery in her 30s, but her writing continued. Tallman added that her dad also influenced her to write. As a veteran of the Vietnam war, she explained, he would share stories with her about his experiences there, but those stories did not match what everybody back home was told about the war.
“One of the things that really drove me to be a journalist was the whole idea that I wanted to be someone who was out there tellin’ the truth to people and they knew they were gettin’ the truth,” she said.
Tallman has published two psychological thrillers, “The All-Soul’s Faire” (2006) and “Crows on the Cross” (2008), as well as two books of poetry, “Timeless Souls” (2004) and “Whispered Words” (2004). She also wrote a couple song lyrics for the blues genre.
Her newspaper background includes a stint at the weekly Chester News and the now-defunct Hopewell News, where she covered news for Prince George County. Her area of focus and “forte” was hard news, including government, police, crime and courts. She said the hardest story she ever had to cover involved interviewing a child molester, and one of the most interesting stories she covered was about Operation Blue Ridge Thunder, an undercover cyberspace patrol of sexual exploitation of children.
On the lighter side, Tallman spent two years as a horse photographer, taking to the road across the nation to cover the Arabian horse show circuit.
“It was a lot of fun, but I still had young children, so I couldn’t stay out there doing that,” she said.
Part of her personal snapshot includes the fact she has one son and one daughter, as well as a second daughter who died in a car accident. Tallman likes old western movies, such as “Red River” with John Wayne, but has also seen every “Law and Order” franchise series more than once.
She landed in Oregon in 2020 with a boyfriend who came to check out the logging work, but she chose to remain on the west coast after he decided to return back east.
“I was happy to see new places,” she said. “When I got here, it was gorgeous and it wasn’t raining, and then all of a sudden it caught on fire.” She followed the statement up with a laugh, explaining she settled in right before the 2020 wildfire season that was reported to be the most destructive fire on record.
After working a couple of retail jobs in Lebanon, Tallman took up the role as The New Era’s news reporter, saying that so far she has really enjoyed meeting all the new people and getting to know the city better.
“It feels like back home,” she said. “Right before I came here, I spent a lot of time in West Virginia and that’s a lot more back in the woods like it is up in Sweet Home.”
The area also suits her well for its abundant camping and fishing opportunities, activities she really enjoys and will be apparent as she continues creating articles that cover those stories. But readers will probably notice Tallman also puts a lot of stock in the hard news stories of the area.
“I’m not gonna lie to you. I’m more driven by fast-paced news that is usually more intense,” she said. “I thrive better in those areas.”