Larson Newspapers’ typesetter Jo Page is at the hub of our community coverage.

Although photojournalists capture breaking news as it happens, reporters investigate tips to tell in-depth stories and editors direct coverage and write commentaries, typesetters deal with it all.

Page’s job is to receive all the press releases, submitted photos, letters to the editor, calendar listings and reporters’ stories, then direct them to their proper destinations. She sorts, formats, edits and prepares all that content for the editors to easily process it from e-mail to the published newspaper page.

It is a job she could have started with fresh out of college, but she came to it in a roundabout way.

Although Page was born in Kansas City, Mo., she was raised on her family’s small farm outside Rockingham, Mo.

The family later moved to Richmond, Mo., where Page went to school.

After graduating from Richmond High School, Page attended the University of Missouri for a year and a half. She soon got married and dropped out to support her husband, who was in graduate school.

They moved to Omaha, Neb., in the early 1970s and Page went back to school. In 1973 she earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Page went to work in corporate communications with Mutual of Omaha, writing internal publications and employee newsletters delivered daily to the insurance company’s 5,000 employees.
Page took time off in 1976 to give birth to her son, Jeff.

While “very pregnant,” Page and her then-husband visited Phoenix and she said she fell in love with Arizona.
Page went back to work in 1977 in public relations with St. Joseph’s Hospital in Omaha.

Shortly after her family moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1979, Page divorced and moved with her son to Scottsdale in 1980. She soon went to work for Scottsdale Memorial Hospital, handling public relations for the nonprofit hospital.

Page took a job with a for-profit corporate health care company in 1985 in Phoenix, then a family-owned in-home nursing care company in Mesa in 1991.

Her next major move came in 1993 when she went to work for herself, selling insurance with Aflac for the next 10 years.

“Insurance sales was left of center for me,” Page said.

In 1992, Page met her future husband, Don Page, in an equestrian club that took rides on trails around Arizona. The couple immediately hit it off, she said.

Two years later, Jo and Don Page got married on the Las Vegas Strip at the Little Church of the West, a chapel listed on the National Register of Historic Places. His birthday is Sept. 11, hers is Sept. 13, so they exchanged vows on Sept. 12 — an easy date for them both to remember, she said.

The couple also bought their first two Rocky Mountain horses, both geldings, Dusty from North Carolina, and Bourbon from Kentucky. The gentle breed is known for its four-beat gait. They bought a third Rocky Mountain, a mare named Lady, in 2001.

Jo Page retired in 2003. The couple had earlier purchased four acres of property in Cornville, which they moved to in 2006, after Don Page retired from Boeing. They also bought their fourth Rocky Mountain, a mare named Misty. Along with the horses, four cats and three dogs, the Pages’ property was bustling with life. Jo Page also volunteers with Arizona Basset Hound Rescue in Northern Arizona, saving members of the short-legged breed.

“Taking care of the animals takes up a lot of my time,” she said.

Page and her husband visit her son’s family and 3-year-old grandson in Denver about once a year and her stepdaughter, Kara, in Cleveland when they can. 

Although Page enjoyed a busy retirement, she was growing bored.

“Being retired isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Page said.

Page was hired as Larson Newspapers’ typesetter in January.

“I have a journalism degree, but I never worked in the field,” Page said. “It’s odd because I’m coming back to where I should have started out.”

“I wrote for so many years; you burn out on it,” she said. “I found I liked the editing part better. The editing has always come easier.”

Part of Page’s talent is her experience dealing with the different sources of potential news items and several hundred press releases Larson Newspapers receives weekly.

Through her several careers, Page has worked with nonprofits and for-profits, and for herself, so she has particular understanding of the sometimes competing needs of all the voices hoping to find their way onto the pages of the Sedona Red Rock News.

“Everybody is selling something to somebody every day,” she said, “but not everything is tangible. It is a resident selling their perspective in a letter to the editor, a nonprofit selling awareness of free services, a musician selling a few hours of entertainment to eager ears or a source selling a tip to a good news story.”

“They may not buy it, but you can try and sell it,” Page said.