MARYSVILLE — For Lauren Salcedo, the recently hired sports and news reporter for The Marysville Globe and The Arlington Times, her new job feels a bit like coming home.

Salcedo has family in Arlington and was also enrolled in Running Start at Everett Community College. Because she was already studying journalism at the age of 15 at EvCC, she soon found herself editing that school’s newspaper.

“I did everything from laying out all the pages to cleaning up after we were done,” said Salcedo, who graduated from high school in 2007 and transferred from EvCC to the University of Washington.

Salcedo’s affinity for the printed page dates back well before her teen years, but it took her a while to realize how she could best channel it.

“Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve loved to read anything,” Salcedo said. “I prefer it to TV or movies. As I got older, I realized that I enjoyed writing real stories more than fiction, with real people. I wanted to get to the heart of things that people don’t always see.”

One such story at Everett Community College centered on an oft-overlooked groundskeeper whose story had never been told.

“He did all the landscaping, and I saw him all the time, but no one knew that much about him,” Salcedo said. “I got his story.”

Salcedo’s resume of newspaper experience extends well beyond her college paper, with stints on the Lynnwood Enterprise — now the Weekly Herald — the Mukilteo and Edmonds Beacons, and the Port Townsend Leader.

As the new sports and news reporter for the Globe and Times, Salcedo admitted that she’s not yet equally well-versed in all kinds of sports coverage, but she does bring knowledge of the field overall and a desire to connect with local teams, in order to tell their stories as personally as she did the landscaper at Everett Community College.

“I hope to build good relationships with our coaches and to tell the whole story, not just about the events, but about the players,” Salcedo said.