About this time every year my anxiety level rises because the Kentucky General assembly is in session. This has been going on with me ever since they started meeting annually. The reason? They keep chipping away with the information you should be entitled to, that is, public...

McDonald’s sells cheeseburgers, and newspapers sell news.  Recently, the News Journal has been experiencing a bit of an issue with social media users screenshotting content that has been posted behind our paywall and then sharing those photos in the comment section.  Let me...

If you form a team and you have the referee on your team, most likely you will win the game. It is almost laughable that the case of Corbin versus London on annexation of the area at Exit 29 on Interstate 75 was held in Laurel Circuit Court. I’m not saying, I repeat not saying...

Competition can be a good thing. Take the Corbin Police Department vs. Corbin Fire Department chili cook-off that was held Thursday evening. Granted not what you were expecting me to say about competition, but it was a pretty good one from what I understand with the Corbin Police...

Joe Beasman Hall had a way of making ordinary people feel like they were his best friend. But it wasn’t always like that. The former Kentucky Wildcat basketball coach who followed Adolph Rupp died January 14. Even though he stepped away from the program 37 years ago at the age of...

Monday morning, I found myself explaining the concept of the “pie supper” to a younger co-worker. For those that don’t know, “pie suppers,” or as I like to refer them “the legal fleecing of the candidates,” are a Whitley County tradition. Various non-profit entities, including:...

From a journalistic perspective one of the few good things I find about social media is that you can get an actual idea about how many people are reading a story or how interested folks are in it. Sometimes our readers really surprise me about just how interested they get in a...

I’m going to start out this week up in the cheap seats by giving a shout out to Corbin Basketball Coach Tony Pietrowski who set the school record for most coaching wins in the program’s history as the Redhounds defeated Whitley County Friday night. Pietrowski notched win 442 at...

And they are off! The official race to finish the Cumberland Run, a new horse track, broke ground in Corbin Monday. By this fall harness racing will be taking place and by January of next year there will be a new restaurant located at the facility. Cumberland Run joins Cumberland...

Jay Bauer was the locker room attendant of the Kentucky Colonels professional basketball team in Louisville. At least that was his title in 1975, and at the age of 23 he had been involved with the Colonels for all nine of their American Basketball Association seasons. He started...

There are more than 2,500 high school students between Corbin, Whitley County and Williamsburg. There are 35,000 people living in Whitley County. So why are the high school gyms so sparsely populated during basketball games? Granted, despite the stereotype, not everyone in...

I almost never became a journalist.  The first time I attended a Kentucky Intercollegiate Press Association (KIPA) Conference was the summer before my second year at Eastern Kentucky University in 2017.  I had just been hired on as the opinion’s editor at The Eastern Progress,...

With the election coming up in May, a few times over the last couple of months, I gave serious thought to writing a column with the headline, “I’d like to take this opportunity to announce my candidacy for…”, and then conclude the column with “my candidacy for nothing. I haven’t...

Please join me in congratulating our news staff for winning 19 awards, including the General Excellence award for being the best large weekly in the state, at the recent Kentucky Press Association’s winter convention. I hope that I can impress upon you the fact that this...

Periodically, I get releases from folks promoting a new service, or a new product or a new book. Most of them I just look at for about 10 seconds then move onto the next release or e-mail. I got one a few days ago about a book that caught my attention, entitled, “Bills! Bills!...

Finally it is happening. The Tracy Apartment building in Corbin is being demolished. It is a story that has gone on for decades. The structure was condemned in 2005 and our newspaper carried a story in 2010 that it would be demolished in the near future. A “flaw” at the corner of...

With little regard to the historical significance of anything created by nature or man, or more importantly human life, an F4 tornado dropped all sorts of destruction on a widespread section of our state on Dec. 11. As tragic as it was, bad things often times bring out the best...

I don’t know if it is a record or not, but I have won two microwave ovens. When I won the first microwave, back in 1983, they were big and cost about $500. At that time I was president of the Corbin Lions Club and we were having a raffle to raise money. Each Lions Club member was...

If you spend any amount of time at all working in journalism, law enforcement, emergency services, social work on in any number of other fields, then there is a pretty good chance you have dealt with a tragedy in some form or another. One of the most tragic ones I have covered...

When midnight rolled around on Dec. 31, 2020, nearly everyone had pretty much the same thought, which was along the lines of “surely 2021 has to be better than 2020.” It wasn’t the first time that nearly everyone has been wrong. I seriously doubt that it will be the last time...