A former Dauphin resident has been tasked with a unique challenge - White House news editor.

Roberta Rampton has been National Public Radio’s (NPR) White House editor, overseeing a team of journalists covering the Trump and Biden administrations for NPR’s radio programs, podcasts, website and newscasts for the past six years.

But, starting Oct. 1, Rampton will join the Associated Press (AP) as their new White House news editor.

And she got her start in journalism right here in Dauphin as a summer intern at the Dauphin Herald in 1989.

“It was my very first real reporting job,” she said, adding her internship began after her first year at university.

“It was really, really fun and people were so kind to me. I’m sure I was very annoying and I had no idea what I was doing. But people were very nice. The people at the paper were very nice and the people in the community were nice.”

After graduating from the DRCSS in 1988, Rampton attended Carleton University for four years. Her first job after university was with the Western Producer newspaper, where she worked for six or seven years.

“That was another really great job. I loved it. I got to travel around and meet all kinds of farmers around Manitoba And I learned a lot,” she said, adding she grew up on a farm and got a lot of tips from her grandfather and uncle about the technical aspects of farming.

“They really helped me out and I learned a lot.”

Rampton’s work with the Western Producer was where she learned everything she knows about listening to people, writing a feature and doing an interview.

From there, Rampton joined the Reuters news agency.

At the time, Rampton said, Reuters had one reporter for the Canadian prairies based in Winnipeg.

“The job was basically to write about agriculture ,primarily. Things that were happening that people from other parts of the world needed to know,” she said, adding that was how she got into wire service reporting.

The biggest story Rampton covered was the mad cow disease outbreak in 2003.

“That was the first massive news story that I covered. Because everyone around was interested in that and it was a really big deal,” she said.

Rampton made the move to Washington, D.C., in 2008 to cover agricultural trade for Reuters. She had applied for the job because of her experience of reporting in the agriculture industry.

Rampton ended up covering a few different beats in Washington, eventually becoming a White House correspondent in 2012.

Read the full story in this weeks Dauphin Herald.