New phenomenon: time to think

In March of 2021 my father asked me if I wanted to buy the Star Eagle: I jumped at the opportunity. At that point in time, Dad’s health had kept him from working for most of the past two years. I had been the publisher for all that time, but not the owner. I can’t really guess why he offered me the expanded role, but he did and I seized the moment. 

I remember the first week after the purchase had been finalized. The Star Eagle office has, historically, been closed on Wednesdays. With the exception of the three years I did the newspaper route, I hadn’t worked on Wednesday’s prior to this. It was a day when I had no responsibilities.

I remember this Wednesday vividly. I was still living at home with my father; he walked downstairs into the little den we call a “family room,” where I was relaxing, watching TV and going through “cards.” (Some of my hobbies include playing card games with my friends.)

My dad asked me what I was doing. “You have to work on Wednesdays now. You’re a business owner,” he told me. 

I don’t remember what I said back but I remember the feeling I had sitting there. Surprise. A little anger. And an impulse to confront him or argue. Until that moment, I had not realized things would be changing now that I was a business owner. 

Regardless of how I felt, or what I said, I went to the office to work. 

Only a few months after my first acquisition, in fall of 2021, I acquired the Golden Link. I chuckle thinking about it now because my mom told me not to do it. “It’ll be too much work.” Yes, it was a lot of work, and more stress, but after a few days' consideration, I ultimately decided to take on a second publication. Fortunately for me, it was the kind of work I was already good at, and that transition went fairly smoothly. I am grateful that my mother was looking out for me; I am also grateful I didn’t listen.

Over the next couple months another idea started brewing in my head. An idea which ultimately turned into the Waseca County Pioneer. 

During that process I asked my mom, owner of the Janesville Journal, whether she was interested in starting another newspaper together. I told her I could use someone to sell advertising and help design the advertisements. She told me it was too much work to handle. 

So I asked Michael to help me instead. Michael, you may know, had been working at the Journal for the past few years. 

I’ve written about the process of starting the Pioneer before. We began by gearing up some of our coverage, especially of the Waseca sports programs. Once that groundwork was laid, I started building a staff, finding a location, and ultimately selling the advertising needed to create a base of support necessary to begin publishing. I like to observe that, no matter how hard Michael, I, and others might have worked on building our system for news and sports, there could be no Pioneer without the financial backing of our advertisers. I’m incredibly grateful to those initial businesses which invested in supporting a new newspaper. 

My gratitude, and that support, continue today: If not for our advertisers (and readers, there literally isn’t a product to print without readers) we couldn’t publish a weekly newspaper. 

It has been a lot of work. One of the few days I’ve taken off since May of 2022 was the first Saturday after we printed our first paper last July. (I have never been more exhausted physically, mentally, and emotionally than I was that day.) The journey felt like climbing a mountain, jumping off, and hoping to survive. 

It’s been a tradition at the Star–one that I am also applying to the Pioneer–that we don’t print a newspaper the last week of the year, over the Christmas/New Year holiday. It’s really the only way to actually give ourselves a break. I managed to take one day off that week; after that, the itch came back. I couldn’t stay away. 

So what of today? Well, today, Saturday, I still have some work to do. There’s a basketball game tonight I intend to photographize, but really, that’s all I have on my to-do list today. 

In my copious free time today I spent two hours reading about camera settings, watching tutorials, and googling words and key phrases I didn’t know about regarding photography.

I really enjoy taking pictures: I’m really good at pointing the camera and getting the photo in focus with the proper framing. But, after numerous conversations, I have learned I know essentially nothing about the fine-tuning of my camera. It took two years, and three days off, to finally give my brain the chance, and the time, to figure out what all those darn buttons do. 

Oh, I also wrote this column today. And, now, I’m about to go off to get lunch with my mother, do some shopping, and then, enjoy some basketball. 

I am writing this column about “days off,” because, just maybe, I may be able to appreciate more of them now that my life has found its new “normal,” its new “routine,” its new system.

If I could end this column with a smiling face emoji I would, but I don’t know how professional or “newsy” that would be. 

Before I forget, I’ve made a habit of writing about my “newsing” adventures. This week was awfully light due to the snow storm. My newsing this past week has consisted of a couple basketball games, and emails to folks asking questions about stories which ran in last week’s paper. All things considered, it was a blissful week. Oh, and the post office lost two bundles of papers and the weather delayed our delivery this past week so I spent two hours returning phone calls, emails, messages, all in addition to individually mailing newspapers too numerous for me to count. 

My dad called me, excited and thrilled, after he saw someone post on Facebook about missing their newspaper. He told me: “Eli, that’s a really good sign. If no one cared about reading the paper, they wouldn’t be complaining everywhere about not receiving it in the mail.”