There Ya Go
The Headlight you’re reading at the very moment is a historic one. It’s the last edition that will be printed locally. Starting next week, your paper will be printed by Forum Communications out of Sioux Falls, with the hope that our logos, ads and photographs will look better than they have the last few months.
This wasn’t a decision Tara and I took lightly, because in this case, changing printers meant changing publication dates.
As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, the Headlight will hit newsstands on Thursday mornings, after it had come out on Wednesday for the last 40 years. When something happens every week for that long, you get used to it, and I know many of you are used to receiving your paper on Wednesday, or accustomed to grabbing it at the grocery store or gas station on a Wednesday.
I don’t like change, but I appreciate the need for it in this case.
This is a change for the better. This is a change for you, not just Tara and me.
I’ve written before how labor-intensive putting a weekly newspaper together. This week-long labor of love is shared by both Tara and myself. Some weeks are more stressful than others, but every week brings its own challenges.
The challenge next week will be trying to remember what day it is.
We’re used to Wednesday publications, too. We’re used to having Tuesday be our deadline day — the day when we complete the paper — from writing on deadline to proofing and squeezing in a late obituary or advertisement. Starting next week, the stress of all of that will hit us Wednesday. And then Thursday will become our new Wednesday, as Tara does the postal reports and I play paper boy.
Then, before we know it, it will be Friday already.
Yes, this is going to take some getting used to. However, I’m excited for the change. I’m excited to see a new finished product — one that simply is more aesthetically-pleasing than what we’ve been offering these past few months.
In today’s business world, you adapt or die, and we’ve chosen the former. Dying is not an option neither Tara nor I have ever come close to considering.
These changes mark yet another memory for us since we took over the paper on April Fool’s Day in 2019. There are many memories we can look back on — things like a pandemic hitting us less than a year after we bought the paper. As if this job wasn’t tough enough, we had to navigate COVID in just our second year and watch our ad revenue plummet because businesses and restaurants had no idea of their future. It surely has been an interesting six years — a lot of good, some not so good, but most of it memorable. And next week will be one for the books as well, as not only are we changing printers and publication days, but our website as well.
This continues to be a scary business to not just be involved in, but to own. What will the ultimate outcome be from Trump’s proposed tariffs? We know it will affect us since so much of this nation’s newsprint is brought in from Canada. How much will the price of that go up? When will the next postal cost increase take place and how much will that be? Will the price of gas stay around where it’s at now, or will it jump substantially later this year or next?
The goal of any business making changes or dealing with external forces is to allow it to affect us as little as possible, but all these factors have the potential to lead to more limited coverage. That’s not what I plan, it’s what I fear.
Change. It’s a scary thought, but an exciting one, too.
