Mark Chap­man

Edi­tor & Publisher

Mark has spent most of his life in the news­pa­per busi­ness, start­ing as a 15-year-old sports stringer for the then-Cape Cod Standard-Times. Mr. Chap­man set­tled into the busi­ness full time 10 years later and never left, with stops along the way at sev­eral non-daily papers, a half dozen small to mid-sized dailies and a 12-year stint at the Boston Her­ald. His range of news­room expe­ri­ence includes news, sports, fea­tures, lifestyles and enter­tain­ment, both as a writer and edi­tor. It was after spend­ing 12 years com­mut­ing 140 miles a day from Cape Cod to Boston that Mr. Chap­man dis­cov­ered South­west Florida and fell in love with the area. He began watch­ing for news­pa­per job open­ings and, two years later, became the Engle­wood bureau chief for the Sara­sota Herald-Tribune.

In addi­tion, Mr. Chap­man was cho­sen by the com­pany to be the start-up edi­tor of Char­lotte Life mag­a­zine, a glossy city mag­a­zine fea­tur­ing the best of Char­lotte County, Engle­wood and Boca Grande, and a hyper­local Web site, PortCharlotteVoice.com, with mate­r­ial sup­plied by users – sto­ries, blogs, press releases, cal­en­dar items and pho­tos. The Web site was accom­pa­nied by a weekly print edi­tion using mate­r­ial from the Web, which Mr. Chap­man also designed and edited.

Mr. Chap­man left the com­pany in Jan­u­ary 2008 ahead of lay­offs that would close the Engle­wood and Char­lotte bureaus, take down the Web site and greatly reduce cov­er­age of Engle­wood, Port Char­lotte and Punta Gorda. He took a posi­tion as exec­u­tive edi­tor of the Atlantic County Week­lies, a Gannett-owned group in New Jer­sey, but began plan­ning his return to his adopted home town of Engle­wood. Engle­wood Edge is the result of that plan.

Nancy Guen­ther Chapman

Reporter & Photographer

Nancy’s news­pa­per writ­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy have led her to cover sto­ries around the world: A Zim­babwe safari, baby harp seals in the Made­line Islands, the rain for­est in British Colum­bia, the Mediter­ranean coast, and cruis­ing the Caribbean and the coasts of South Amer­ica and Alaska. She has writ­ten for the Boston Her­ald, Cape Cod Times, Vineland (NJ) Daily Jour­nal, The Daily Voice in Nor­walk, Conn., and the Sara­sota Herald-Tribune, and was edi­tor of the Bridgeton (NJ) Jour­nal. At the Herald-Tribune, she cov­ered com­mu­nity news in Engle­wood, North Port and Sara­sota for five years.

Eric Chap­man

Designer & Inter­net Wrangler

Eric is a free­lance illus­tra­tor and graphic designer who grad­u­ated in 2006 from Rin­gling Col­lege of Art & Design in Sara­sota. After obtain­ing his degree in illus­tra­tion, Mr. Chap­man took his tal­ents to The Pan­ta­graph in Bloom­ing­ton, Ill., where he won two state press asso­ci­a­tion awards in the year-plus he was there. One of his illus­tra­tions, depict­ing the argu­ment between those sup­port­ing Dar­win and those sup­port­ing cre­ation­ism, was picked up for inclu­sion in a Dan­ish text­book cov­er­ing the debate in the U.S. Mr. Chap­man returned to Florida and worked for the Braden­ton Her­ald, where he won two more state press asso­ci­a­tion awards for his design work. He taught sev­eral course at Rin­gling Col­lege of Art & Design, includ­ing web design, and is cur­rently a con­tract employee with WWE (World Wrestling Enter­tain­ment) in Stam­ford, Conn.