Making a ‘dream’ career change

Matt Pearl

Things are about to change around Pearl Publishing, Inc. Our family, which has included The Tri-County News since my parents first owned the operation 15 years ago, is about to expand.

Pending final paperwork and handshakes, Pearl Publishing, the corporation owned by my wife, Emily, and me takes possession of The Albany Ledger April 30. The Ledger has been owned and operated by Don and Christy Groves for several years, and they are fine members of the Albany community.

The Groves are ready to move forward with their professional plans, part of which include ownership of The Adams County Free Press in Corning, Iowa. We wish them the best, and look forward to this opportunity to serve all of Gentry County.

Several of you have at times been readers of both publications, and our plan is to continue to give our readers unique local content in each paper. Though certain news and community items will appear in both publications from time to time, each readership will have a newspaper directly serving it.

In other words, The Tri-County News will still be your news source in King City, Stanberry and Union Star. The Albany Ledger will be a publication geared toward the news and events of Albany and the surrounding rural areas and communities.

Putting the publications together into a single county paper was something we could have done, but we have chosen instead to keep the identities of each separate publication.

We enjoy what we do in King City, Stanberry and Union Star, and we feel sure that the system that works now will work in Albany as well. We love covering community and school news. We enjoy publishing local high school sports and including features on interesting people from the area.

Those concepts work in every small town — and most bigger towns, for that matter.

This transition also marks the end of my teaching career, a professional calling of mine for the past 13 years.

I spent four years teaching at South Nodaway, then nine at King City. My time as an educator has been well spent, and will certainly continue to inspire me as an editorial writer and advocate for our solid local schools.

My dad published this paper for a decade, a pursuit he always describes as 10 years of having his “dream come true.”

After being bounced around various places while working for a national newspaper chain, he got the chance to buy his hometown paper. He loved every minute of it, and he passed his simple dream to me when he retired in 2010.

Now, we want to grow. We like what we do, and we want to bring our style of community journalism to another town with a similar culture to those we already serve. Albany is a good fit for us, and we can’t wait to prove that we’re a good fit for Albany.

To our readers, I would like to say this change is going to help our TCN product, because the days of my being torn between my roles as publisher and as teacher are over. I finally decided what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Gentry County is a wonderful place, and the thought of publishing both of a great county’s weekly newspapers absolutely gives me a thrill. All of us at Pearl Publishing are looking forward to this welcome change. Wish us the best!