Printer Friendly Version - 20 Years of Alan Ellis = 20 Years of The Source

Meet Alan Ellis, Shore Publishing’s production director. This is the side of Alan’s head, which is pretty much all any of his coworkers ever see as he’s tasked with laying out seven newspapers each week. Photo by Brian Boyd/The Source

Editor’s note: Behind every successful company are individuals dedicated to that company’s success. Forgive our introspection as we continue celebrating our 20th anniversary by recognizing one of our own: Alan Ellis.

Alan Ellis is a behind-the-scenes kind of guy who prefers his achievements unrecognized. Hopefully this article will make it onto the printed page of The Source, since that’s where Alan runs the show. He’s Shore Publishing’s production director, and he has been almost since day one. Growing up in Madison, he graduated from Daniel Hand High School a couple of years ahead of Shore Publishing’s founders, Ryan Duques and James Warner. Warner followed Alan to Bryant College, and offered him a job at The Source during Alan’s senior year at college, 1996, when the newspaper’s home base was still the Warner’s family home.

“I figured it was something to throw on a résumé, I didn’t really think about what it was going to become,” says Alan, who showed up late for his interview in a tie-dye T-shirt and cutoff jeans, smelling slightly of his summer job at the Fish Tale, according to Duques and Warner.

None of the three would have guessed what Alan would become: not just the longest serving employee, but, 20 years later, the backbone of the paper, and the heart and soul of Shore Publishing.

As production director from the paper’s third issue (they were monthly back then) to the present day, he oversees the layout and design of seven shoreline newspapers every week. Starting from the ground up—he had taken one semester of desktop publishing at Bryant—Alan learned every aspect of newspaper production in the paper’s early days, pulling 65 hours in four-day weeks and tackling problems as they arose.

“We had such a small staff that I was building ads, laying out pages, working the front desk,” Alan says. “Together we figured out how to make things work.”

Part of figuring out what worked back then was figuring out what didn’t work, like delivering the papers by car instead of the Postal Service (that was a long, long week). Some parts of the job have simply evolved—back in dial-up Internet days, Alan used to save the papers to zip drives, then hop in his car to get those drives to the printing press in time for deadline.

“There are just different challenges that come up all the time, and solving problems is—I think—fun,” he says. “Things just keep changing—the industry, the technology—so you’re constantly learning, which makes it interesting to just continue and learn more and do new and interesting things.”

His long-term co-workers rely on his dedication—and his ability to calmly keep things moving in a hectic schedule.

“Alan is probably the quietest person at Shore, but his silence carries so much power,” says Publisher Robyn Collins. “When he catches me talking to [Editor] Brian [Boyd] at deadline when he’s waiting for content, all he has to do is come in and stand there with us to make me slink back to my own office. He doesn’t have to say a word for us to know what he wants—and since he’s Alan, we all want to make him happy. It’s his calm demeanor, general likability, and the way he just gets things done that makes everyone respect him.”

For Alan, it’s also satisfying to see a physical manifestation of those long hours: the newspaper you’re holding in your hands.

“Doing layout, you get to physically see what you’ve done for your job, and when the paper’s printed it’s neat to have something tangible like that,” he says, “and it’s cool to give something back to the community that we all grew up in.”

When he’s not working to push seven newspapers through their production run, Alan runs. It’s something he’s done since high school, where he ran track. It’s another way Alan gives back to the community, too. His interest in running intensified in 2014 when the organization OutRUN 38 was created in support of Liz Shuman of Madison, a friend of Alan and his brother Dave. Given a childhood life expectancy of 12 due to cystic fibrosis, the “38” refers to the age Liz turned in 2014—the “OutRUN” part refers to her outrunning her odds. Today, the group has almost 6,000 members who log miles of running, walking, cycling, and swimming in support of adults living with cystic fibrosis.

Alan has participated in Run the Gauntlet in Madison and Rock the Gauntlet in New Haven every year they have been held, along with the Warrior Dash in Madison the past two years, two Spartan Sprints at Fenway Park, plus a couple of Madison Turkey Trots, soundRUNNER’s Winter Warrior Challenge, and more. You might spot him on the streets of his current hometown, Branford, running in anticipation of the OutRUN Branford Half Marathon, to be held on April 30. However, for the most part, he still likes to stay out of sight.