Awards only won as a result of group effort

Our Publisher, Don Estep, already touched on this in his column, but I just wanted to briefly talk about the News Journal’s first place General Excellence win in the Kentucky Press Association’s Excellence in Kentucky newspaper contest.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

We compete in the large weekly division, which is has always been one of the toughest divisions in my opinion. It feels like our competition gets stiffer every year, but I am happy to say that once again managed to get the win.

I’ll be the first to admit that it is nice to get recognition from your peers. It feels good, and it doesn’t happen every day. In fact, we only compete for awards once a year. I am happy to see our staff get this well-deserved honor.

We have a really great staff here at the paper, which is one great big dysfunctional family. It takes everybody to make this paper happen week after week, and I am thankful for some of the best co-workers in the world.

Don Estep has already written about the rest of us, but he deserves some recognition here too.

The biggest priority for some bosses is to pinch pennies as tightly as they can without taking into account quality.

While Don knows the importance of keeping costs down, he also knows the importance of hiring good people. Then he helps clear the way and makes room for them do their jobs to the best of their ability.

Not every boss is this wise, and we do appreciate it.

If we need help, then Don is there. If he has suggestions on how to improve things, then he will throw those out and see what we can do with that. The special section that we did on the 100th anniversary of the Corbin High School Football Program last year is a great example of this.

Also, let me give a shout out to all of our loyal readers and subscribers, plus the advertisers that appear here in the News Journal. Thanks for all of your support. We literally couldn’t do this without all of you.

Newspapers are a business, and it is no secret that a lot of them are struggling in this day and age. I won’t say that it isn’t challenging for us too sometimes. We are fortunate, though, to have loyal readers, who pick up the product that we put out week in and week out, and who also support our advertisers.

We really do appreciate you all, even those few readers, who do the equivalent of heckling in the comments section on our Facebook page from time to time. (You know who you are…LOL).

Now let me touch on a few other topics before I conclude this column.

• Best of luck to the Corbin City Commission, which is in the process of picking a new city manager for the first time in 12 years. On Monday, they narrowed it down to four finalists. I think I can speak for the whole town when I say that I hope they pick a good one. By and large, a city is only as successful as its leadership.

• While I didn’t make it to the Corbin Arena last week for the All “A” Classic basketball tournament, it sounds like the event was very successful. Congratulations to Corbin Arena Manager Kristina Balla and Corbin Tourism Director and Downtown Manager Maggy Monhollen along with all of their staffs for helping to make this event and others like it possible. I can say without reservation that these are two of the hardest working women in Corbin.

• Speaking of hard working women, I attended the ribbon cutting for Cinema Social Friday. Corbin Mayor Suzie Razmus, who is also part owner of the facility, her husband, Greg Razmus, and the rest of the folks over there have done a fantastic job to add bowling, a restaurant, a golf simulator, and other virtual reality simulators to the facility. The sampling of food that I had Friday was good too. If you haven’t made it out there recently, then you probably want to go check it out. It looks really fun.