It’s been busy around here

It’s been a busy month or two around the newspaper office. From preparing for the changes in formatting to adjusting to new deadlines for finishing the paper on time things have kept me on my toes. I have also been without a reporter for quite awhile now, because of which some of our normal coverage areas have been lacking lately.
I am a one person editorial department right now and I can only be in so many places at a time. I am also a mom and a wife and have other obligations I have to attend to as well. For those of you missing our coverage of the commissioners meetings, I understand and we will have someone covering them again soon, but right now that isn’t possible.
The commissioners meet during the day on Fridays. Fridays are a production day at the newspaper and in order to get the paper finished and sent to our printing partners by noon on Tuesdays I have to be able to dedicate that day to putting it together. I have a hard deadline set in order to have the paper on our streets on Wednesdays there is absolutely no wiggle room.
I am trying my hardest to make sure that I don’t miss any of the other meetings since they are usually in the evenings, but unfortunately I have had to choose between events at times and the responsibility of motherhood at others.
Last week was a slow week as far as evening assignments go and unfortunately the one night there was a meeting, City Council on Tuesday night, I had to step away from the editor and be a mom. I am lucky to work at a business that understands that sometimes I have to make that type of decision and stand behind me. It isn’t a decision I regret in anyway, but I do hate not having coverage of the meeting in this week’s paper. I had plans to listen to the Facebook Feed and write something up from that, but unfortunately the city had something come up and were not able to do their usual Facebook Live feed either.
We are currently working on hiring a new staff writer to help me out around here as soon as possible.
Until that time I would like to thank the girls in the front office who have been helping me out as much as possible and I would also like to thank our readers for being understanding of the situation.
As always we appreciate the partnerships we have with the community in helping fill our coverage gaps. Even when we are at full staff we are still a very small department and could not do it without the help of our readers.