A Bladen County Super Paper

ELIZABETHTOWN – After having been a “North Carolinian” now for almost a month, I can truly say that you have all captured my heart. By now I hope that you have read one of my editorials or columns or news stories. It’s for you that I came here.

One of the things I wanted to bring to North Carolina was my expertise in journalism and my ability to be a storyteller and a dreamer. What you see is what you get.

With all of the newspapers going belly-up in the last few years, it’s always a concern to me that it could happen to us here. As the new editor of the Bladen Journal, one of the things I had to do right away was sharpen my pencil, evaluate our bottom lines and ensure the strength of the paper – making sure that it didn’t go the way of many papers that have closed up shop.

According to Statistica.com, 2,886 newspapers have turned out the lights and shut down the presses since 2004. That’s an alarming stat dealing with a shutdown of communication, a closed advertising avenue and an important tie to our past.

In cutting costs but still yielding an even stronger paper, we have had to cancel our second run of the week – and we are now moving to becoming a once-a-week paper. The idea is to become a county Super-Paper of sorts that has quality articles, color pages, solid information and more pages packed into our Tuesday paper.

Everything that you have received in Friday’s paper will now move to Tuesdays. You won’t miss a thing, and we will be able to build for bigger and better things. Hopefully to bring the Bladen Journal back to where it was in its hayday.

As publications all over the country have had to cut back due to printing costs, paper costs, staffing costs and production costs, we followed suit, but we are doing so without leaving information and quality out.

We have moved to a 12-page paper on Tuesdays and by May 1, I am hoping to bump that to 16 pages and then 20 pages by next fall. As circulation grows and advertising increases, we can become one of the strongest weeklies in Eastern North Carolina.

While in Wyoming in a town a bit smaller than Elizabethtown, we faced some of these same challenges, and as we say in Wyoming – this is not my first rodeo. While there, we went from worst to first, and were awarded the award for the top weekly newspaper in Wyoming by the Wyoming Press Association. In three years we won 27 awards for writing and photography.

I am hoping that we can accomplish the same things here. At times, being a staff of two (Alex Brooks and myself) we have a lot of territory to cover and many stories to write – and we thank you in advance for your patience to get to everything while still maintaining a healthy life outside of the newspaper.

If you have any news or events that you’d like for us to cover, you can contact me directly at the Bladen Journal or if you are at an event we can’t get to, and you want to take a few pictures and get me the information, we will be happy to publish. In a community newspaper, everyone must buy into lending a hand every once in a while.

I see great things happening here in Bladen County and see such an incredible group of people so accommodating, so kind and so helpful. I can’t help but be excited for the direction we are heading.