Twenty years of Press movies
Tell The Press to send me a celebratory cake.
Sometime at the end of the summer of 2006, I began writing movie reviews for the Coeur d’Alene Press. It certainly hasn’t been every week, but here at the end of summer 2026, I’m STILL writing movie reviews for this paper.
The summer of 2006 contained many life milestones. I graduated from college in May, got married in July, and started a full-time position as clerk in the newsroom at The Press in August. Former managing editor Mike Patrick hired me. Bill Buley was there! Mark Nelke was there!
I answered phones, managed the events calendar and worked the obituaries desk. The paper ran an Arts & Entertainment section on Fridays, usually composed of a local feature story and a bunch of syndicated content.
Mike liked the reviews I wrote at my college newspaper. He didn’t like that I started my writing career at the rival Spokesman Review. I wrote reviews for their then-teen section starting my sophomore year in high school. Take that, Spokesman! The Press stole your probably future film critic!
The Hayden Cinemas already advertised in the paper, and so we pitched them to sponsor a new weekly column of reviews. Basically, they’d let me into a movie every week for free and we’d run a little “Sponsored by” blurb at the bottom. We called it “Ticket Stubs.”
I know I wrote my first review in August, but I can’t remember the movie and, well, I don’t really know how to use the Press’ online archives. I don’t think we did the best job saving electronic copies of stories back then. The first article I found in my email was a 1-and-a-half star review of “The Covenant” that ran Sept. 15, 2006.
Not exactly the best review to send people to the Hayden Cinemas to see a movie. To their credit, they never once made a comment about anything I wrote, even when I told people to avoid a movie they were playing.
At some point, I ditched the four-star rating and moved back to my preferred letter grade system. Then again at some point, I stopped publishing letter grades. Fun fact: I still keep a journal of letter grades of every movie I see; I just don’t share them so I can tinker endlessly throughout the year. I’m a nerd.
My writing responsibilities at The Press evolved and expanded until I left the paper for a year before returning as the special section and North Idaho Business Journal editor. Even when I was gone, I kept writing reviews every week for Friday’s paper.
I left the paper full-time permanently toward the end of 2011, when I decided I wanted to stay home with my infant daughter. I officially became a freelance writer and, you guessed it, I kept writing reviews every week for The Press. Then came my long-running parenting column. Then came Live Well Magazine. And a “how did it survive for so long?” real estate column. Then various other writing gigs (to the point where nobody cared anymore about me writing articles for the “rival” Spokesman Review).
Wait, did The Press win the Great North Idaho Newspaper War of the 2000s?
Yes, I missed weeks here and there. But The Press basically had a movie review written by me every week until I started alternating weekly between the parenting column after I graduated from law school in 2025.
Working as an attorney this past year, my writing output at The Press has decreased. Still, I feel like I’m coming through every couple of weeks (or so) with a new movie review or film-related column.
Good enough to call it recurring. Good enough to say it’s stuck around for 20 years.
We don’t call it Ticket Stubs anymore. It runs on Saturdays rather than Fridays. It launched two of my favorite recurring bits — the movie themed “Cage Match!” and the “If You Asked a Critic” series, in which I pose movie related questions of my own creation but claim they are from local readers with obscure movie references for names. I think I’m the only one who likes that column, but nobody ever complained, to my face anyway.
I haven’t stepped foot in the newsroom in at least five years. I honestly, legitimately, don’t know who I’m supposed to talk to about my paycheck. People claim that Bill Buley worked out of the state for a few years, but, look, there he is, still ready to discuss “Top Gun” or “August Rush” with me.
Twenty years of movie reviews in The Press. I’ll keep going (occasionally) until somebody tells me to stop. A big shout-out to Mike Patrick, who not only hired me out of college, but basically said “do what you want” in the arts section, so long as I didn’t enrage too many subscribers.