I’m trying to learn to write 2024 but as usual it isn’t going so well. When I started to type these notebook entries, I said 2024 in my head but typed 2023 and had to go back and correct my typing.
It is safe to say I am a slow learner and slow to change. Occasionally I still write 19 when starting to write a date.
Seems like only a couple of years ago we worrying about Y2K and being told all our electronics would crash when the century turned and our vehicles might stop.
Actually it appeared to be a bunch of worry about nothing. We still have computers running daily in the newspaper office that were built in the 20th century. There are some things they won’t do but they still do what they were designed to do. Many of our work stations have two computers. A newer one for the new programs we use and an older one for the older programs. Often I’m reading from one and entering data on the other.
We do have one computer that refuses to accept a current century date. But for what we use it for, that doesn’t cause a problem.
Rather than fussing about date errors, I’m more concerned about the weather forecast for next week and the delivery of our newspapers and all the travel the postal service schedules for our newspapers. The weather service on Tuesday was forecasting one to two inches of snow for tonight (Thursday) and much more someplace in the heartland on Tuesday.
The postal service has scheduled big changes in the way newspapers are handled later this month and I don’t think the changes are all good. For example, we currently take the newspapers bound for Burr Oak to Mankato on Wednesday. We place The Express and Jewell County Record papers in one container and that container stays in the Mankato office until the next morning when a contract driver picks them up and takes them to Burr Oak. The papers for Jewell are also combined in one container and the same driver drops them at the Jewell post office shortly after noon on Wednesday.
But that may change. At this writing it looks like part but not all of the Jewell and Burr Oak papers will have to be taken to a distant processing plant and then sent back to their final destination.
This is already happening on the Nebraska side. Here in Superior, we used to get the Sutton and Red Cloud papers on Thursday morning but now that they have to go into Omaha we never get them before Friday. Some weeks the next paper has been mailed before we receive the prior week’s paper.
Whoever designed these transportation schemes enjoys traveling more than I do.
In the first 12 years or so that I was associated with The Express, the paper was printed in Belleville. That made for some hairy transportation stories.
We had overnight mail service between Belleville and Superior. When we had extra sections, we sometimes mailed the early run negatives at 5 o’clock in Superior for the next day’s press run. One snowy day, two of us were making the run to Belleville for the paper. We had the printed papers loaded and were returning to Superior when in the Byron area we came across a jack-knifed milk tanker. The truck’s stainless steel tank was nearly invisible in the snow. Thankfully, I saw it and was able to steer around it without wrecking but I remember it as a close call. We got the papers back to Superior in time for the 5:40 dispatch.
On another occasion, mail dispatch times had been advanced and we had to regularly drive the papers to the Hastings processing office. That night Floyd Wheeler and his neighbor, Jack, were taking the papers in. They were busting snow drifts but they hadn’t been stopped until they reached the Central Community College entrance drive. There students leaving the college had gotten stuck blocking the newspaper’s route into Hastings. When the traffic jam was cleared, the newspaper van was stuck and had to be pulled out with a wrecker.
The guys stayed the night in Hastings and returned to Superior the next day. Back in here, they were surprised to discover they had broken the mountings for both front shock absorbers while busting drifts.
It was a relief when we installed a press in Superior and no longer had to make regular trips to Belleville and Hastings. For a few years, we didn’t even have to take the papers to the post office. The star route driver taking the papers to the processing plant stopped at our door and we helped him load.
But mail routes were changed and we had to start driving the Kansas papers to a Kansas post office. First it was Webber and now it is Mankato.
Currently we are driving papers to post offices in Mankato, Nelson and Lawrence in addition to the Superior office.
And weather forecasters are beginning to sound the alarm for next week. Snow enters the forecast today (Thursday) and it appears a major storm is setting up for Tuesday. It is too early to know how that storm may impact this area.
This season’s Christmas storm didn’t turn out to be as bad as was first expected and that may be true with next week’s storm but we won’t know until later.
We haven’t seen a lot of snow so far this winter, but one newspaper employee who drives in from northern Jewell County has already stayed one night in Superior and missed one day of work, mostly because of the mud associated with the December rain and snow.
As my age advances, I have realized I am not invincible. I don’t want to be stranded in a snow storm and I am less likely to take the same chances I did 40 or 50 years ago.
Unlike the old days, when the printed paper was the only way we had to deliver our content, we can now deliver the paper via the internet. Everyone with a subscription to the printed paper can obtain access to the electronic version by submitting a request with their email address.
To see a sample of the current electronic offering, a free trial subscription can be requested by going to any of these three www addresses: superiorne.com, nuckollscountynewspapers.com. or jewellcountynewspapers.com.
And we hope to expand our electronic offering in the near future. The upstairs office that has been vacant since the death of Howard Crilly, is being prepared for use as a digital studio.
It’s too early to say what our final product will be because we don’t know what it will be, but we are going to experiment and invite our readers to come along for the ride. We don’t believe newspapers are dying but we do believe newspapers are changing. It’s an exciting time to be in this business and I suggest young people consider a career in journalism. I don’t regret switching from engineering to journalism as a college freshman.
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