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Date: 10/4/2022
Recently, a coworker of mine was talking about a family member of his who has a new boss that was hired from outside their company. He explained that this family member was frustrated, as the new boss wants to do team building activities and make a few changes to the business. It was all too much – they did not want change – and they certainly didn’t want to have rah-rah sessions with coworkers that they already know – or at least think they know.
The sentiment of this coworker’s relative reminded me of college. On the first day of class, every student would groan (sometimes silently, sometimes audibly) when a professor asked to go around the room and have each kid say their name, what their major was and a fun fact about themselves. No one likes to be put on the spot in a room full of people, and no one likes to come up with a random fun fact about themselves.
And yet here I am, knowing these sentiments, sitting in an interesting position in my career where I’m asking my colleagues-turned-staff to humor me with team building activities and a fun fact.
Well – I haven’t asked them to come up with a fun fact to share amongst the news team yet, but I’ve considered it.
A few weeks ago, former Executive Editor G. Michael Dobbs shared with readers that he was retiring, and that I was taking his place at the helm of Reminder Publishing’s news operation. Last week in this column I reflected on my time spent and lessons learned with Mike, and I promised this week I’d share more about The Reminder moving forward.
First, I will provide a small amount of background on myself to catch up readers who may have missed some of my other columns.
When I was 5 years old, I knew I wanted to be a journalist. I used to love watching the Today Show – I always thought I wanted to be in broadcast television – an anchor, specifically. This never wavered. When I graduated from Monson High School in 2013, I attended Holyoke Community College (HCC) to earn my Associate of Arts and Sciences with a concentration on communication and journalism. Between a combination of a high school creative writing class and a few HCC communication and journalism classes, I realized I did not, in fact, want to be on TV.
I wanted to write.
I fell in love with the ability to tell someone’s story – and to tell it well – that a print journalist has. In full transparency, I also realized that while I love working and some may argue that I’m a workaholic, I didn’t want to work on nights, holidays and weekends.
In retrospect, I do work most nights, and many weekends, but I certainly am not spending my holidays with anyone but my family. In TV news, there would be countless years of spending time instead of with my family, behind the news desk – and giving up family time is non-negotiable for me.
After my time at HCC, I transferred to Western New England University (WNEU) where I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in journalism, and later during my post-grad years I went back to WNEU to earn a Master of Arts in public relations, advertising and applied communication.
Not to denigrate the extremely expensive pieces of paper that I now have framed and will soon be hanging in my new office – but the years that it took to earn each of my degrees are nothing in comparison to the knowledge I’ve gained first-hand working at The Reminder for over five years.
I began working for The Reminder during my senior year of college, starting as a freelancer, and was quickly offered the position of assistant editor upon graduation. It was during this time that I spent a great deal of hours covering news for the East Longmeadow Reminder. I attended town meetings in Hampden, Wilbraham and Longmeadow, was witness to countless East Longmeadow Town Council meetings, enjoyed chatting with community business owners and attended many local events.
Shortly after I transitioned to a new role – assistant managing editor – we were bought out by Advance, making The Republican our sister company. Since then, we have been on the most rapid expansion plan over the course of four years that only slowed down this year on Aug. 4 with the completion of our Western Massachusetts weeklies, ending on our Springfield North and Springfield South Reminders.
In our fleet of publications, we now boast 12 weekly newspapers going as far east as Worcester County communities Warren and Hardwick, as far south as Enfield and Somers, CT, as far north as Leverett and as far west as Otis. We also have a daily newspaper, The Westfield News, and two monthly magazines – Prime and Go Local.
To paint you a picture – five years ago, we had two newspapers and two magazines. That’s it. We also only had four people on our news team. Now we have 19.
For the first time in four years, our company has a moment to breathe.
Needless to say, I’m hoping the news team will humor me in an upcoming meeting we all have scheduled to have pizza and to simply talk. I cannot tell readers the last time we had a get-together where we weren’t discussing the next newspaper, the next project, the next big change. I’m hoping to alleviate any concerns the team may have and to build back the bond we used to have pre-coronavirus pandemic – and before we had two offices.
Change is scary for many. While I am someone who easily adapts to change, I know many people cannot say the same. Judging by the wonderful comments that I saw on Facebook under Mike’s retirement announcement, readers might be anxious that their favorite newspapers could be undergoing change with there being a new person in charge.
While readers will see a few small changes, I’m hoping they are ones that will be appreciated. Mike will continue as a bi-weekly columnist for our Reminder publications, and I will be joining the fold on a more regular basis with columns. In addition to Mike and me, we will be welcoming another columnist or two. The idea here is to add variety, and varying political opinions.
I don’t believe it is my job as executive editor to tell readers where I stand politically. Presenting quality journalism without bias is something we have always done, despite assumptions I’ve read online in the past that we are a “left-leaning” newspaper. We have an outstanding team of reporters and editors who work extraordinarily hard to publish factual articles without political agenda.
The only other change that will affect the papers is one of necessity – Mike, as announced in his recent column, will no longer be writing our movie reviews, and he is passing the torch to Matt Conway. Matt has been with us for over a year now, and in another job, he writes movie reviews professionally. Matt has a unique viewpoint and watches many films of today, and I’m excited that we have the opportunity to have his reviews in our papers. In addition, we might also add some varying topics to our dining and entertainment page, not limiting ourselves to just movie reviews.
Our strong, hyper-local journalism will continue. Each person in the seats of our reporters chairs remain the same. Though, with Mike’s retirement we had the opportunity to offer Chris Maza my former Hampden County east managing editor position, giving him a larger number of papers to work on and also bringing him back to where he started with the company many years ago – right here in the East Longmeadow office. We also were able to offer Dennis Hackett the Hampshire County managing editor position, promoting from within.
Between Chris, Dennis and our Hampden County West Managing Editor Michael Ballway, we have a hardworking team of editors who are scrupulous in their efforts to bringing the news that matters most to our readers, in conjunction with our editorial team. I can’t say enough about the work that the entire news team cranks out each week. We have so much talent in our offices, and I feel lucky to work with each of them.
As Mike always invited community members to write letters to the editor, I will continue with the same policy. Submit them to pnorth@thereminder.com or news@thereminder.com.
I’m looking forward to getting to know my team and readers all the same.
I hope that though this shift may be an institutional change to many longtime readers, that you will trust and see that while change may be scary, this change is not.
Thanks for reading.