Deadlines, election nights, and … romance?

Working in journalism means running into a fair amount of newsie couples. Earlier this month, we asked our audience for their newsroom love stories, and you didn’t disappoint.

We received plenty of responses from newshound lovebirds: rival television station reporters seeing each other across the room, college newspaper sweethearts, reporters co-bylining stories long before co-bylining marriage certificates. For a Valentine’s Day special, we invited a few journalist couples who responded to our post to share their stories in more detail.

The newsroom crush everyone noticed

Dustin Dopirak and MJ Slaby first met in 2014 at The Herald-Times in Bloomington, Indiana, where Slaby landed as a higher education reporter after leading the local college’s campus newspaper.

Dopirak, a reporter at The Herald-Times covering collegiate athletics, thought she was gorgeous from her Twitter profile picture, which he saw when she followed everyone in the newsroom before her first day.

Their co-workers quickly noticed the way Dopirak would linger at Slaby’s desk. On St. Patrick’s Day, a group of local sports journalists were hanging out before going to a bar when they sat him down.

“They’re all like, ‘Alright, so you’re going to start dating MJ. It’s about time,’” Dopirak said. “And I was like, what? How did anybody even know this was a thing?”

At the bar, they ran into other Bloomington journalists, including Slaby. But the sports reporters soon had to leave when news broke of a football player caught in a riptide during spring break. “He did give me his beer, but he still didn’t ask me out yet,” Slaby said. “Romance.”

Eventually, he did get around to it. They’ve been together for almost 10 years, and married for almost five.

One of Dustin Dopirak and MJ Slaby’s engagement photos, featuring newspapers. (Courtesy)

Dopirak eventually left Indiana for Tennessee to break into college football reporting at the Knoxville News Sentinel. Five months later, Slaby followed, scoring a job as the News Sentinel’s higher education reporter.

In Knoxville, their beats converged on a big story: allegations of sexual abuse against a college football player. As the paper’s higher education reporter and college football reporter respectively, Slaby and Dopirak spent months covering the allegations.

“It was very intense reporting,” Slaby said. “If you’re going to do reporting like that and you’re going to be paired with a male colleague, I’d like it to be Dustin.”

After Tennessee, the two worked in different outlets in Pittsburgh before making their way back to Indiana. Now, Slaby is Chalkbeat Indiana’s bureau chief and Dopirak is The Indianapolis Star’s Indiana Pacers beat writer.

Dopirak and Slaby said that being in a relationship with another journalist provides a common ground and a shared sense of ethics. That also means they know when to tell the other person to put work into perspective.

“You can get intoxicated with the idea of wanting to be absolutely everything,” Dopirak said. “To really be all that you want to be you have to throw entirely too much away. You kind of need somebody to be there to say no, and forcefully say no. She has.”

A city council meeting leads to love

Romance was not on the agenda at the Beaumont City Council meeting.

But television reporter Agustin Garfias Jr., knew a scoop when he saw one that day in 2012: A new reporter was working for his rival news station, and he thought she was beautiful.

Leslie Rangel, then on just her second day on the job at CBS affiliate station KFDM, was looking to make friends in small town Beaumont when she met Garfias: “I remember he had a nice smile, and I was like, ‘Oh, someone friendly!’”

Garfias, who was working for NBC-ABC duopoly station KBMT-KJAC, introduced himself, and they soon found out they were both Dallas Cowboys fans from the same part of Dallas. The KBMT-KJAC photographer he was there on assignment with later hopped on a computer Garfias had logged into Facebook on and friend requested her on his behalf.

They became best friends and eventually started dating, trying to keep it a secret so people didn’t think they were sharing contacts or story ideas. Garfias got in trouble at work when he rode in KFDM’s Mardi Gras parade float with Rangel, so the secret didn’t stick for long.

Leslie Rangel runs into her husband Agustin Garfias Jr. on separate reporting assignments for their respective television news stations. (Courtesy)

For early career journalists, constant moving from market to market can get in the way of lasting connections. When Rangel accepted a job in Oklahoma, she thought things would end naturally and if it was meant to be, they would end up in the same town eventually. She said she didn’t want to be the reason he missed out on opportunities, like getting to network television.

“She thought I was gonna lose out on a dream,” he said. “I was like, ‘Well, I kind of hate it here. It’s always been the plan to have a family, so I’ll figure something out when I get to Oklahoma with you.’”

They did figure it out. The two are now married and live and work in Austin, Texas. Rangel is the anchor for Good Day Austin on Fox 7 and Garfias is an anchor/multimedia journalist for Spectrum News 1. They’ve learned from each other over the years, with Rangel picking up camera skills from Garfias and Garfias always having a second set of eyes for his stories.

Both being television reporters, they each understand the other’s struggles, whether it’s carrying equipment or being on air for hours at a time.

“I think that because we work in the same industry, we are able to understand each other. I imagine that a journalist who cares about their job and works hard might have a hard time explaining to their lawyer husband or their nurse wife what kind of day they had,” Garfias said.

Rangel, who also works as a mental health coach and yoga instructor for journalists, said developing coping skills is necessary while living with another reporter under the same pressures.

“It’s been really important to make sure that even though we’re both journalists, I’m trying my best to leave journalism stuff at work,” she said. “And even when I come home, and I vent, I’ll ask for permission first, like, do you have capacity to take this on? Because maybe you dealt with something really stressful at work, too.”

Managing four weeklies and a marriage

Working from home can make it challenging to separate work and life. For Micah and Kayla Green, a married couple managing four weekly newspapers at Alabama’s Gulf Coast Media, it means home becomes a newsroom most days. But they say the constant quality time isn’t a problem.

“I’m not fooling around that we do spend 20 out of 24 hours together every single day,” Micah said, “The stereotype is ‘I could never do that’ and I just, I’ve never felt that way.”

The Greens met in 2016 at the Forsyth County News in Georgia, where Micah worked as a photographer and Kayla as a news reporter. He was intimidated by her at first, a sharp graduate of the University of Florida’s journalism program to his Mississippi State communications degree. She liked how he could make sources easily feel comfortable, how much he cared about both getting a nice shot and telling the story at hand.

Some of their first “dates” were on assignment, following Micah’s idea profiling local restaurants and expensing the bill. (No harm, no foul: The publisher joked about it at their wedding.) They got to know each other better, including during a scary moment at a 2016 rally for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Atlanta after the candidate pointed to the media area labeled them the enemy, prompting jeers.

Kayla and Micah Green posing for a photo with awards from the 2022 South Carolina Press Association news contest banquet. (Courtesy)

But Kayla said she had “journalism tunnel vision” and didn’t realize he was interested until they covered a protest at the governor’s mansion and went back to Kayla’s apartment so Micah could file photos on deadline. He “conveniently forgot” his press credentials after leaving, Kayla said, and made his way back to the apartment to tell her he had feelings for her.

She had just been promoted to editor and was worried about the perception, so took a day to weigh it over before saying she felt the same. They had to break the news to their publisher when they took the same time off to visit Kayla’s family for Thanksgiving.

After Forsyth, they moved together to work at The Sumter Item in South Carolina, and then moved again to Alabama. Kayla is now the executive editor and Micah is the chief digital officer at Gulf Coast Media, which also owns The Sumter Item.

Working in local news can be grueling, especially under the existential threat of “economic headwinds.” For the Greens, working at outlets with sustainable business models was a priority to avoid that precarity. Relying on each other has been vital, they said.

“I don’t know that I would have been in the same position I am today without having that kind of partnership,” Kayla said.