Daily Herald’s newest syndicated columnist builds on local foundation

Esther Cepeda is embarking on a “dream job” as a nationally syndicated columnist, but her foundation, she says, is local.

Cepeda, whose Washington Post Writers Group column has begun running regularly on the Daily Herald editorial page, cut her journalistic teeth on local news as a reporter for the Daily Herald. She lives in the Round Lake area.

“My reporting experiences were critical (to my writing today),” Cepeda said Tuesday. “The Daily Herald taught me about individual municipalities and what their issues are — what it is like for a police chief for Hanover Park, what it is like for administrators in a place like Bartlett. It was interesting to see the issues that affect town leaders and that very intimately affect people.”

Cepeda worked for the Daily Herald before joining the Chicago Sun-Times as a reporter and eventual columnist, the job from which she began pitching syndicate services on the need for the voice of a Latino woman.

Now, Cepeda says, she builds on her local experiences as she explores regional and national topics for a column that is already in nearly 50 newspapers around the country, including the Dallas Morning News, The Arizona Republic and newspapers in cities as wide-ranging as Seattle, Indianapolis and Rochester, N.Y.

The Post group began syndicating her column in October, filling a void that she saw in Latino voices in the media.

Born in Chicago 36 years ago to parents who came from Ecuador and Mexico to join family here, she cites her heritage as an important part of the inspiration for her column. But it is not her central theme.

“I like to tell stories of the American melting pot.” she says. “I’m a writer who happens to be Latino (but) I’m interested in issues that are important to everybody. Whenever I can commingle those things, it’s great.”

Cepeda shuns any particular political label, calling herself “independent” and stressing that she looks for topics different from what other national columnists are talking about.

“I hope it keeps readers from seeing my byline and saying, ‘Oh, I know what she’s going to say.’” Cepeda says. “I am a Chicagoan at heart, and yet I am the perfect example of a Chicagoan who had to seek better housing, who had to seek better educational opportunities, who had to seek a better quality of life outside the city.”

With her husband and two young sons, today that means writing from their home in central Lake County, talking with neighbors at the local Panera shop in Round Lake Beach and riding Metra into the city several times a week for appearances and business.

“I love Lake County, and I look forward to talking to people in town every day,” she said. “This is like my dream from when I was a child.”