Ask anyone who’s ever worked with Jaime Jordan what they think of her, and a common word emerges: leader.

This year, Jaime becomes the first recipient of the Star’s Outstanding Young Alumni Award. In the 4 ½ years since she graduated, she has risen to a reporting position with the Dallas Morning News, the nation’s 10th-largest circulation daily.

A Springfield native, Jaime came to NIU in 1994 as a journalism major and black studies minor … thinking she wanted to become a political speech writer. As a freshman, Jaime met Erica Wood, another freshman journalism major and a reporter for the Northern Star. Wood encouraged her to apply.

“I started working at the Star and just fell in love with newspapers,” Jaime says. “The energy, the excitement, all those minds that loved journalism and newspapers, discussing stories all the time.”

Jaime started as a cultural affairs reporter, then got the Student Association beat. Within a year, she was campus editor, and then was elected editor in chief for three successive semesters.

Close friend Kristophere Owens remembers “her ability to be an editor-in-chief without acting like an editor-in-chief. Jaime was an obvious presence at the Star, but her office was quiet. There was no barking from her and hardly any yelling. Most importantly, the paper ran smoothly.”

“I remember Jaime as one of the best leaders I have ever worked for,” says Jason Schaumburg. Both Jason and now-wife Jen Bland served terms as managing editor under Jaime. “We always tweaked with the look of the paper,” he says, “and we tackled tough issues – from fraternity suspensions to one of the craziest SA president elections the school’s seen.”

Almost lost among all of that, both for Jaime and the staff, was that she was the Northern Star’s first African-American editor in chief. “I never really thought about it until someone said something,” she says. “The staff respected me as an editor.”

“Being the first of something can be a little overwhelming,” Wood adds, “but no one really made a big deal about it. It was what it was.”

After graduating, Jaime worked for Knight Ridder newspapers, briefly in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., and then for two years at the Fort Worth Star Telegram, where she covered the seemingly odd combination of police and religion news. In 2000, she jumped to the nearby Dallas Morning News. She covers suburban news and also hopes eventually to return to religion reporting.