Introduction
John Huotari is a city hall reporter at The Oak Ridger newspaper, which is published five days a week in East Tennessee. He has worked there since October 2005, and he mostly covers municipal government. However, he also covers a wide range of other news stories, from police and courts to the U.S. Department of Energy and politics.
John has served as president of the East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists, a nonprofit organization. He is currently chairman of the Society of Professional Journalist's national membership committee. More information is available online at the SPJ Web site or at The Garden Center membership blog.
Before starting at The Oak Ridger, John completed two internships at the News Sentinel in Knoxville and was a staff writer at the University of Tennessee's Daily Beacon.
Prior to becoming a reporter, John studied music at UT, sold musical instruments at retail stores, and played drums and percussion for more than a decade, including in rock, country, and reggae bands in Seattle, Denver, and Knoxville, Tennessee.
John is currently studying HTML and CSS, which he is learning to use to build this site. He has also started blogging at hootyshouse.com, using WordPress, a blogging platform. And he's working his way through several Web development books, including one each on Drupal and Joomla!, both open-source content management systems.
John is married, with two stepchildren, two dogs, and three cats.