Pearls: Everything can not stay the same

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

Well, our organization has gone through a few changes lately, and I’ll take a few moments to describe a few of them for our readers.

This past week, we passed the torch of The Grant City Times-Tribune, which is now under the ownership and operation of Ken Garner and the crew at The Maryville Forum. We wish Mr. Garner and his staff the best in covering a great community.

Our reasons for letting Grant City go to The Forum and its capable staff were manifold. The most important reasons that our organization essentially outgrew itself: Brent Johnson and I found ourselves unable to serve the Worth County community the way they deserved, and rather than close the doors up at Grant, we found another local publisher able to better serve those folks.

We thank the Grant City people, the Worth County R-III School and the entire community up there for their support. You are in good hands, and from now on you’ll get the best of your hometown newspaper and the best of The Forum.

Of course, our other big change has become old news: the merger that created The Tri-County Ledger, a combined product representing the two former Gentry County papers – The Albany Ledger and The Tri-County News – is becoming more familiar to us and our readers.

So, if you’re keeping score, we went from three papers down to one in about a six-week stretch. Now the goal is to make our one newspaper the best we possibly can make it.

I guess my biggest takeaway from this experience is that sometimes the best decision I can make is to allow change to happen.

I agonized over the decisions I casually mentioned above. It’s not an easy call to make permanent changes regarding such old publications. But at some point, I stopped pacing the floor and began to trust my gut. That’s when decision get made, I learned.

Anyway, small-town journalism continues, community newspapers have their place and the world keeps spinning. As it turns out, my agonizing and pacing were unwarranted, and the vast majority of folks have fully understood our decisions to consolidate and simplify aspects of our operation.

Maybe years from now I’ll look back and have the answers to the questions with which I have wrestled over the past several months. Did I fail in Grant City? Could Albany and Stanberry and King City share a newspaper? Someday I’ll know the answers. I suspect that Grant could go down as a minor failure for me – and I can handle that, and maybe Gentry County’s towns will take a little longer to coexist on our pages than I might have wanted – but my hope is that someday we’ll know we made the right decisions.

For now, I’m busy being excited about the Ledger. We have already done things with the paper that my staff and I had discussed for a long time: the look of it, the way we cover schools and sports, the composition of the front page – all kinds of things are coming together.

The bottom line is that we want people in our communities to look forward to reading the newspaper. We are doing all we can to load it with local content every week, and we’re having the best time working toward that very goal.

My advice to anyone, particularly during these days of change in our rural areas: do what you must to keep our small-town institutions alive. Things cannot stay the same as they were and stay viable. We need to pool our resources, combine our efforts and give our people as many reasons as we can to remember why we all choose to live here.

Matt Pearl owns and operates newspapers in King City, Albany and Grant City.