I am a professional journalist covering outdoor adventure sports and nature. I explore these through a Substack blog called Joe Dits on the Outdoors, which continues the 20 years of work I'd put into outdoor columns at the South Bend Tribune newspaper in South Bend, Indiana. (I actually worked a total of 33 years at the Trib.) But now I am blending in bits of faith and healing.
At the South Bend Tribune, I reported on and wrote about every beat except for ball sports. That included my first few years in the features department, plus many years of writing about social issues and immigration, then eventually education and city and county government. I also enjoyed a few years of writing about arts and entertainment as we all survived cancelations and upheaval through the COVID-19 pandemic. I turned journeys into stories, including a bike trip through Ukraine, a return to Zimbabwe where I'd spent all of 1996 as an orphanage volunteer, cultural immersion in Latin America and a search for local roots in Belgium.
I'd gotten my start after earning a bachelor's degree in journalism from Butler University in Indianapolis, then working a couple of years at The Anchorage Times newspaper in Alaska (1988-1990).