Meet Felicia Mason

Greetings to all!

I’m Felicia Mason and the new night city editor at The Blade. Happy to be here.

I grew up in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, where my family lived after moving from Cleveland. My undergraduate degree is in mass media arts from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, and my graduate degree from Ohio State is in black studies with an emphasis on community development.

If you don’t count having a paper route, working part-time as an ad inserter at a community paper, and being on the high school newspaper staff, my first journalism job was as a reporter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I started there as an intern and later covered municipal government, schools, and police. The bulk of my time was with the Daily Press in Newport News, Va. Most recently, I was at the Houston Chronicle as an assistant metro editor and utility editor.

I’ve been a lot of things throughout my career: copy editor, editorial writer, night metro editor, police and courts editor, features editor, columnist, intern coordinator, reader editor (typically called ombudsman), and staff development editor (aka recruiter/trainer). I even wrote a serial novel for a newspaper. This leads me to the other life: I’m a novelist with about two dozen titles published by St. Martin’s Press, Kensington Publishing, and Harlequin. One book was adapted and made into a TV film. These days, I’m working on crime fiction. I like to write, scrapbook, and travel in my free time.

Learning new things is a passion of mine, so I’m looking forward to getting to know Toledo and everyone at The Blade.