Nick Rogers

Nick Rogers has been an editor and writer in the fields of arts & entertainment and features for the past 13 years. This isn't surprising for someone who, at age 8, stole his brothers' Cure, Poison and Genesis albums not for spite but for personal enjoyment and had parents cool enough to immediately rewind, and re-watch, "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" at his whim.

An Illinois native and award-winner both for features and opinion writing, Rogers began his professional career in 1995, at age 16 as a sports stringer for The Journal-Standard - a 20,000-plus-circulation daily in Freeport, Illinois. That progressed into: reviews of theatrical and home-video films; daily page design; and helping create the Community page - a compilation of news from surrounding small towns much like the one Rogers grew up in. (Lanark. Population: 1,500. Closest movie theater: 20 miles away. Number of stoplights in the county: One, and that took quite some time.) Rogers continued to write for The Journal-Standard until 2000.

In 1997, Rogers began studying journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After a year devoted to playing trumpet with the Marching Illini, his extracurricular activities reverted to entertainment writing. Starting as a film reviewer for buzz magazine - a weekly entertainment supplement to student newspaper The Daily Illini - Rogers eventually became the movies section editor, executive editor and, in his senior year, editor-in-chief of the magazine. He also reviewed everything from local restaurants to bad "Blair Witch" book spinoffs, and wrote about such trailblazing rock bands as Self, which recorded an entire album using children's instruments and toys.

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 2001, Rogers freelanced for the Chicago Tribune (separate stories about new blood-donation technology and the Illinois Railway Museum) and the Herald & Review in Decatur, Illinois (covering Champaign-Urbana's entertainment scene, including an early interview with Noam Pikelny, who is now part of the Punch Brothers with Chris Thile of Nickel Creek). He then became communications director for Forster Products, a gunsmith-tool parts plant in Lanark. There, he supervised the redesign of all marketing and instructional materials.

Just when he was about to seriously pursue a job in the particularly barren portion of Alaska - where DVDs would have to be delivered via air every six months - Rogers was hired as the arts & entertainment writer at The State Journal-Register, a 55,000-plus-circulation daily newspaper in Springfield, Illinois.

In July 2002, Rogers took over an award-winning section in the state capital, where he directed, edited and wrote coverage of film, popular and classical music, theater, visual arts, dance and electronic entertainment. Getting only five minutes on the phone with Cyndi Lauper, fielding a personally returned phone call from reality TV impresario, detailing Hal Holbrook's eloquently informed rants about politics, and reviewing local theater productions where the fog machine got a little crazy - all of that, and then some. His work was nationally syndicated through Copley News Service and, later, GateHouse News Service, and his film reviews are archived at www.rottentomatoes.com/author/author-8719/

While there, he spearheaded a radical redesign to the section (from broadsheet size to tabloid size) and, after a promotion to editor, began a blog (blogs.sj-r.com/unpaintedhuffhines) and earned first-place honors from the Illinois Press Association for Best A&E Section and from the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors for Best A&E Commentary. After almost six years on that beat, Rogers was promoted to become the newspaper's features editor, where he oversaw the weekly production of 11 sections ranging from teen issues to outdoors activities. Rogers left the newspaper in September 2008.

As comfortable as defending "Deep Rising" as he is blasting "Babel," Rogers has opinions and knowledge on entertainment that have generated plenty of feedback in his wake. It's his hope that he'll be able to do the same on Suite101.