Who we are
Based at 357 South 200 East in Salt Lake City, Wasatch Journal is a wholly owned subsidiary of First Tracks Publications, a multimedia corporation that also owns the highly lauded Big Sky Journal, Tahoe Quarterly, and Western Art & Architecture.
Douglas Swanson is the founder and chief executive officer of First Tracks Publishing.
Active in its day-to-day management, Swanson has assembled and leads a team of industry professionals. Prior to founding First Tracks Publishing, he served as vice chairman of HomeSeekers.com, Inc., where he was instrumental in raising $60 million in capital and building the revenue base from under $2 million to over $20 million. He was involved in the acquisition and subsequent management of 10 real-estate magazines while at HomeSeekers.com, Inc.
At First Tracks Publishing, he is responsible for strategic direction, acquisitions, and overall management. In addition to acquisitions including Big Sky Journal and Tahoe Quarterly, the company has created Wasatch Journal and Western Art & Architecture. Directly reporting to Swanson are publishers located in Salt Lake City, Incline Village, NV and Bozeman, MT.
His career started on Wall Street, where he was a technology analyst for Brown Brothers Harriman. He joined Western Asset Management as an analyst and was a shareholder at Trust Company of the West prior to moving to Reno and acting as a promoter for several small technology firms.
Derek Swanson is publisher of Wasatch Journal and president of Wasatch Journal Media.
Swanson assumed the leadership of the Wasatch Journal in May, 2008, and plans to spearhead the second-year expansion of the magazine in sales and distribution throughout Utah. As president of Wasatch Journal Media, he oversees the custom-publishing division of the company, working closely with the Salt Lake Convention & Visitors Bureau to produce publications that promote the best of Utah.
Swanson attended Brigham Young University (BYU) and began his career in Irvine, CA, where he managed the construction of three, high-end residential developments. Having grown up in a publishing family, he joined the Wasatch Journal team as a sales executive. He rose quickly to head Wasatch Journal Media publications in the summer of 2007, before his current position as president and publisher.
A cancer survivor, Swanson is in the process of establishing a non-profit organization. Called Infusion of Light, it will provide resources to those undergoing chemotherapy.
Swanson grew up in Reno, NV, spending most of his summers swimming in Lake Tahoe and his winters snowboarding in the Sierras. Although defecting for a while to California where he enjoyed the ocean, Swanson couldn’t resist the call of the mountains. Swanson eventually returned to Utah, working to promote the lifestyle and culture that he loves.
William A. Kerig is editorial director of Wasatch Journal Media.
Kerig brings a wealth of media experience to Wasatch Journal Media. He has directed and produced films, helmed Internet companies, authored books, edited magazines, and written hundreds of articles on subjects ranging from technology to travel to sports.
Kerig grew up in the Boston area and graduated from Saint Michael's College in Vermont with a degree in finance in 1984, but quickly abandoned notions of a career on Wall Street to become a dishwasher at Snowbird Ski Resort. Soon after, he moved to Vail, Colorado, and became a professional skier on the World Pro Mogul Tour. He also began writing and producing, eventually contributing to international and national outlets including ESPN, CBS, and ABC, and magazines such as Men’s Journal, Ski, Skiing, Powder, Fast Company, USA Today.com, and Men’s Health. He also wrote books, including Utah Underground, which Outside magazine called the “Best Guide to Utah.”
Kerig wrote, produced, and was second-unit director for the 1998 independent feature film Net Worth, starring Daniel Baldwin, Craig Sheffer, Michael T. Weiss, and Todd Field. Blockbuster Entertainment bought the film, and it is available there today. In 1999 and 2000 he served as president and chief operating officer of LevelRed, Inc., a San Diego–based Internet company. For Peter Jennings’s PJ Productions, Kerig created Steep, a documentary set in the world of big-mountain skiing. He co-produced and was second-unit director on the film, which Sony Pictures Classics released on 125 screens in North America in December 2007. In March 2008, Kerig received an Outstanding Achievement Award from the International Skiing History Association for his work in the creation of Steep.
Current projects include a nonfiction book entitled The Edge of Never: A Skier’s Story of Fathers and Sons in the World’s Deadliest Mountains (forthcoming in 2008 from Stone Creek Publications) and a feature film of the same title. Kerig lives in Salt Lake City with his wife Bel, daughter Grace, and son Liam. He is a member of the Wasatch Writers Alliance and a member in good standing of the Directors Guild of America, and serves on the Board of Trustees at The Salt Lake Convention & Visitors Bureau. He still spends many winter days on the slopes of the Wasatch Range.
Eric J. Ellis is associate publisher of Wasatch Journal Media.
Born on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Ellis grew up with mountains, rivers, and the Pacific Ocean at his doorstep. He moved to Utah in 1999 after an unforgettable summer guiding Boy Scouts on kayak and backpack excursions through Yellowstone National Park and other public lands.
After receiving his associate degree in Business Management from Utah Valley State College, Ellis went on to study advertising and marketing communications at Brigham Young University. Understanding the world he lived in was always a fascination, so Ellis minored in chemistry. He became convinced of the need for effective advertising in every successful business by working in service and construction as well as the sales and banking industries.
He now resides in the beautiful mountains of the Heber Valley, where he continues his outdoor adventures with his sweetheart, to whom he was married in November, 2007. Together they try to pack in as much mountain biking, hiking, snowboarding, snowmobiling, and dirt biking as possible.
Dorothee E. Kocks is managing editor and fiction editor of the Wasatch Journal.
Kocks began her writing career as a journalist in a small town in Maine, where she covered Town Meeting debates over which garbage truck to buy. Having grown up in large cities, she was delighted that the hardware store owner (who left the key under the mat) was the equivalent of a mayor, and that the Avon lady sold her a piglet to raise. She became the editor of the weekly feature magazine for Foster’s Daily Democrat.
She left Maine to study small-town democracy from a historical perspective. She earned a Ph.D. from Brown University in 1992 and became an assistant professor at the University of Utah the same year. She taught environmental and Western history and learned the term “powder day” from her students. But the academic world proved too confining, especially after she discovered the accordion. She bought a shiny, bright-red Gabbanelli and took the leap into a life of writing.
Kocks is the author of Dream a Little (University of California, 2000), an academic memoir about Western landscapes. Her fiction has won Utah Arts Council awards and artist residencies in places as far flung as Barcelona and Minnesota. She performs “Accordion Monologues,” which she describes as prose pieces enlivened by the comic beauty of the accordion, at the Utah Arts Festival. She is a founding member of the Wasatch Writers Alliance, formerly called The Greater Salt Lake Writers Guild.
She lives in Sugarhouse, which she considers to be the perfect urban neighborhood, with her husband and two dogs.
Linda Rendek is creative director of the Wasatch Journal.
Rendek was born and raised in Palo Alto, CA. She attended the University of California at Berkeley and earned a degree in advertising from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.
She has worked as a designer for a wide variety of clients, including Arabian Horse World magazine, Atari, Apple computers, and Hutelmeyer & Lavidge Advertising. She was art director for publications including Fairways & Greens, the KCTS 9 magazine, Atlanta Parent, and Utah Business before joining Wasatch Journal.
Rendek, who has also lived in Los Angeles and Arizona, moved to Utah three years ago from Atlanta and lives in Salt Lake City’s 9th and 9th neighborhood with her two kids, Tyler and Madison; two dogs, Sox and Annabelle; and cat Buck.
She skis and plays tennis; she is also a master gardener and spends far too much time and money at Home Depot.
Melissa Bond is associate editor and poetry editor of the Wasatch Journal.
Born in Fairfax, CA, and raised in California’s Bay Area, Bond began her writing life by scribbling disaffected teenage poems on the backs of café napkins in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury.
After having attended St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM, for two years, Bond moved to Salt Lake City in 1995 to complete her BA in English at the University of Utah. Six months after moving, Bond founded Salt Lake’s first Poetry Slam and ran it single handedly for eight years. Since that time, she’s formed two guerilla poetry groups, written for magazines throughout the Salt Lake valley, written and produced a series of soliloquies about a demented Appalachian family, and performed a section of the Vagina Monologues at Kingsbury Hall. You’re welcome to ask her about the particular monologue. Her mother still feels awkward about it.
Bond is the recipient of the Mayor’s Artist Award for the Literary Arts, 2002 and City Weekly’s Best Poet in Motion, 2006. She has run the Utah Arts Festival Literary Arts Program for the past 8 years and has taught creative writing in and around the Salt Lake valley. Four months after Hurricane Katrina, she and two other artists went to New Orleans to help clean and tear down houses. While there, the three of them created makeshift hazmat suits out of Hefty garbage bags, tore soaked drywall out with their bare hands, and photographed and interviewed residents to create the New Orleans Project, a multi-media exhibit that has been shown all over Salt Lake City and San Francisco. Bond has performed her poetry throughout Salt Lake City, Seattle, San Francisco, Asheville, NC, and Austin, TX. You can find her first book of poems, Hush, at Ken Sander’s Rare Books in downtown Salt Lake.
Bond now lives a stone’s throw from Trolley Square with her husband, two cats, a quorum of chickens, and their baby on the way.
Whitney Childers is associate editor of the Wasatch Journal.
Armed with a degree in Wildlife and Fisheries Ecology (now Natural Resource Ecology and Management) with an emphasis in Communications from Oklahoma State University, Childers spent her first working year teaching kids how to fish and helping adults keep snakes out of their lawns.
She started an 11-year career in newspapers in 1996 as a small-town reporter and photographer in Oklahoma. She chased wildfires, deciphered city comprehensive plans, and even frequented a weekend political discussion group hosted by the “Old Farts Club.”
Childers decided to follow her mountain-loving heart and soon moved to Colorado where she spent more than five years editing for local papers in Vail and Frisco. Childers rose from a reporter, then news editor at the Vail Daily and then accepted the position as editor of the Summit Daily News in Frisco. While there, she embraced mountain-town living —sharing numerous residences with myriad roommates and taking advantage of two-for-one dinners during the mud season. Her two proudest moments in Colorado include completing a ski adventure race without “losing her cookies” and helping sponsor an environmental living and sustainability forum in Frisco.
In 2003, she, her fellow journalist husband, and their dog spent several months traveling throughout the West and living out of their Volkswagen van. Later that year, Childers became a city editor at The Idaho Statesman in Boise, working with a talented team of reporters who covered education, growth, the environment, and city hall.
Childers and her husband moved to Salt Lake City in 2007 for a job transfer, promptly renovated a house near Liberty Park, and had a baby boy. Despite sleep deprivation and untimely forgetfulness, Childers has enjoyed exploring her new city and its incredible mountains.
Beth Moon is Park City sales and marketing director for the Wasatch Journal.
Born in Peoria, IL, Moon began her career in Southern California where she was a partner in a restaurant and nightclub chain. She moved to Park City 15 years ago with her two sons, drawn by the school system and lifestyle. She still can hardly believe her luck in finding this very worldly small mountain town with hardly any traffic, smog, or crime.
Moon previously was director of operations at Wolf Mountain, the resort later renamed The Canyons. There, she staged rock concerts, special events, and ski and snowboard competitions. This is a natural role for her, as she’s always urging people to have fun.
She has also worked in advertising, interviewed talent for the Sundance Music Cafe, hosted Park City TV’s annual Dining Guide, and helped the Park Silly Sunday Market get off the ground. For her own fun, she plans gatherings with her Soul Tribe, skis or snowboards, attends as many concerts as possible, reads, and practices yoga. She is an animal lover who has rescued several animals from the local shelter.
Heather Brown is the managing editor of Wasatch Journal Media custom publications.
After a brief internship at the Wasatch Journal in the fall of 2007, Brown advanced to managing editor of the custom publications of WJM. These publications include the annual visitors guides produced for the Salt Lake Conventions & Visitors Bureau.
Brown grew up in northern Virginia and has made the Wasatch Front her home for the past 10 years, the most memorable of which have been spent in seven different apartments (and counting!) in downtown Salt Lake City. She graduated from Westminster College with a BA in English literature and social psychology. She is deeply sentimental towards her alma mater and the Sugarhouse neighborhood that surrounds it. Her writing has been published in the Westminster Review alumni magazine, Honorable Mention honors program newsletter, and Myriad academic journal. Most recently, she served as a full-time AmeriCorps volunteer with the Utah chapter of the March of Dimes, coordinating a program for low-income pregnant women throughout the Salt Lake valley.
Brown lives in the Avenues neighborhood of Salt Lake with her two kittens, Frankenstein and Finnegan. She is an expert on free and low-cost arts and culture activities in Salt Lake and budget travel around the globe. After catching the travel bug with a semester of study abroad in Florence, Italy, she has visited Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Washington, D.C., New York City, San Francisco, and the northern California coast, and looks forward to seeing more of the world.
Liz Paton is art director of Wasatch Journal Media custom publications.
Liz Paton grew up in Michigan and spent five years in Germany as a teenager. While there, she was able to travel and visit wonderful places across Europe. She received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, where she studied Communication Arts and Design. While still in college, she started a freelance web and graphic design business, which she still operates today. After living and working in the Washington, D.C. area for two years as a graphic designer for an urban planning and architecture firm, Paton decided to move to Salt Lake in the summer of 2006 to enjoy the mountains. She recently worked for the Utah Geological Survey, where she designed Survey Notes magazine. She spends her free time snowboarding in the winter and hiking in the summer and is also an amateur photographer.
Paton is an animal lover and volunteers for a local animal-rescue group. She has two dogs from shelters: Zeppelin, a Great Dane/boxer mix, and Gonzo, a Boston terrier. She lives downtown with her fiancé, two dogs, and six-foot iguana named Zilla.
Adelaide Haley Ryder is associate art director of the Wasatch Journal.
Born in the Vermont backwoods, Ryder has lived in Salt Lake since 1985 when her family moved here for the snow.
Ryder began working in publications as a teenager and quickly found her calling. She graduated from Westminster College with a double major in Communication and Art. She ran the school’s newspaper and founded Fill, Westminster’s art magazine. Ryder has worked at Catalyst magazine since 2004, in advertising sales, graphic design, and production.
A passionate photographer, Ryder’s work has been exhibited throughout the Salt Lake Valley. She co-founded Snap Studios Photography and Design with her twin sister Emma Ryder and with Jessica Fahey.
