Naomi Girson | staff writer

Every Thursday morning, well past midnight, Anthony Conroy and a posse of newsroom editors would take that week’s edition of The Duquesne Duke to a printer in the South Side.

After the work was done, they would go back to the now closed South Shore Diner on East Carson Street to have their postmortem – as he called it – over coffee and breakfast, before doing it all again the next week.

Conroy was the sports editor and then editor-and-chief of The Duke during his time studying journalism at the school from 1993 to 1998. Before he even graduated, he found opportunities to work for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review, first in the sports section, and then later expanding to news.

After college, he continued working for the Pittsburgh publications before getting hired in Georgia at the Savannah Morning News, as a news planner and a designer.

As Conroy transitioned his role in the newsroom from writing to designing, he saw the judgment as the designers’ role, saying people called them the “pretty picture people” but he maintained his job was one of the most vital in the room.

Essentially, he had to sift through the reporters’ stories, the photographers’ pictures, the graphic designers’ graphics, the editors’ demands, and make everything cohesive on the page for their readers.

“That’s why, in the end, you’re the one that has that full view, you know all the discussions you had with every single one of those departments, and you’re the drain,” Conroy said. “You’re the one that’s now trying to figure out as things are circling, here’s what you’re grabbing, and here’s what you know, here’s what you’re giving the most prominence to, and why.”

Conroy went to Savannah to have more freedom with what he was designing, being able to take some of the responsibility away from the writers, who held a bigger majority of the power in the other newsrooms he had seen.

After working in Savannah for three years, he went to The Baltimore Sun, taking more leadership as the design department director.

The Sun had hundreds of thousands readers, and Conroy was responsible for making sure the copies in the newsstand were the best retelling of each story.

After eight years at The Sun, he returned to Pittsburgh to work for the Post-Gazette once again, becoming the man in charge of their “This Just In” breaking news section.

Duquesne professor Pamela Walck, who once worked with Conroy in Savannah, said their shared time in the newsroom came at a golden age for journalism. They had a predominantly young staff, and digital was just taking hold, so the paper editions were where Conroy could shine.

“I think that at the time, the Savannah Morning News was just in a really creative space, and Connie definitely contributed to that because no idea was too crazy, no design was off limits, And because of that, we produced some really interesting journalism,” Walck said.

Walck said that Conroy was always creative, coming up with ideas no one else would think of or be brave enough to publish.

In their legislature section, called “Our Government,” he once crafted baseball cards for the legislators, complete with “batting averages” calculated based on their passed proposals. In the same section, he also once asked a cartoonist to design comic panels depicting the government members as superheroes.

Josh Gillin, another veteran of the Savannah Morning News, sat next to Conroy at the designer’s desk, and they even lived together in Savannah. What Gillin remembers most fondly about Conroy was his humor, and tangentially, his work ethic.

“Connie was always good for a laugh, right? He was a jovial guy, and he liked to talk to everybody, and he was always ready with a joke or to laugh about something. But when it came down to having to work, he was very dedicated, and would always buckle down and become serious and get his work done,” Gillin said.

Conroy was a risk taker with his designs, but was rewarded for his pushing of boundaries, Gillin said.

One page Conroy designed was for a story about children with AIDS. He put a striking close-up photo of a baby with the disease on the front cover, winning him a Society for News Design award, according to Gillin.

“It used powerful imagery in a way that really called attention to the issue and illustrated what the story was about, which was the point,” Gillin said.

At Duquesne, Conroy admitted he didn’t always go to class, or do well on his tests, but he was putting all his energy into either The Duke or other publications he worked for.

He remembers spending a lot of time sleeping where he could, when he could — in his car, on a couch in the newsroom or crafting a makeshift bed in a hidden nook on campus.

Conroy barely minded his unconventional habits, as long as he was up on his reporting.

“You definitely have to hustle. You have to have that can-do attitude, but, if you don’t have that, that ability to experiment and make mistakes and learn, because you have to learn a little bit on your own too. It’s not always about tutelage and mentorship and stuff like that. Sometimes it’s just about you figuring things out for yourself,” Conroy said.