Beyond the Byline: Michelle Holdway, relentless grammarian and No. 2 on the night copy desk

News editor Michelle Holdway is second in command on the night copy desk, overseeing the editing and design of the inside news pages and supervising reporters on the police beat.

A relentless grammarian, Michelle is one of the style and policy gurus at the Daily Herald. She also organizes the paper's coverage for primaries and general elections.

She's married to Neil Holdway, the assistant managing editor for the copy desk, and don't think they didn't have some awkward conversations with supervisors and employees when they started dating.

Michelle's first newspaper "job" was writing for the Sixth Grade Bugle at South Side Elementary School in downstate Herrin. She penned the Tiger Tales column, which her father had written years before in the early 1960s, in Herrin High School's Tiger Tattler newspaper, but being editor of the Herrinite yearbook sparked her love of pagination.

Now a Schaumburg resident, Michelle graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 1994 and started working at the Daily Herald in November 1998.