Giving thanks for your support of this newspaper

Thanksgiving! I give thanks for many things in my life, God, family, country and more things that I can fit in this column.

Don Estep is publisher of the News Journal.

But because it is my newspaper column I am giving thanks to Terry Forcht, the many staff members that have worked here, our advertisers and especially you, our readers who have made this newspaper successful.

It is Terry Forcht who gave me the opportunity to become the publisher of this newspaper over 35 years ago. It was more of a risky move for me than it was for Terry.

No other weekly newspaper had ever been successful going against the daily newspaper in Corbin and there had been several that had tried. I was 48 years old with a wife and three daughters and this venture had to be successful for me.

I was hired to be the publisher of the Whitley Republican with the idea that we would start a sister edition of the newspaper in Corbin. That we did and called it Corbin! This Week, the first newspaper in this area to have full color.

That was in 1987 and later in 1992 we merged the two editions to become the News Journal.

After college I worked for ten years in radio, then seven years at the Cumberland River Comprehensive Care Center. After that Jim Lee Crawford offered me the job of advertising manager at the Corbin Times-Tribune.

I had a staff of four ad sales persons. Since I did not want to take any accounts away from the sales staff I choose to go mostly in the Williamsburg area. I am glad I did. I met and made so many friends there, never with the thought that I would someday become the publisher of the town’s hometown newspaper.

Later the persuasive and late great Al Smith talked me into becoming the ad manager of the London Sentinel-Echo. It was my first venture into a weekly newspaper and one that convinced me that starting a weekly in the Corbin area would work.

I left the Sentinel-Echo because Smith sold it to a chain newspaper company and I was contacted by the publisher of the  Whitley Republican with an offer to become its publisher.

When Terry Forcht agreed that we could start a Corbin newspaper to go along with the Williamsburg newspaper I took on the challenge of my life.

I am thankful to all who have made our newspaper a success. And you may ask why at my age am I still here working at the newspaper. It is an easy answer. I love and enjoy it.

After all of these years I am still amazed every week when a new edition of the News Journal is published. The amount of work to produce it is great. Somehow the staff gets it done.

And all credit goes to our staff for the honors this newspaper has received. In the Kentucky Press Association’s annual contest for Excellence, the News Journal has won first place honors four of the past five years in the large newspaper division.

So, you see, I have a lot to be thankful for with just this newspaper alone. Happy Thanksgiving to all of you. And thanks for reading the News Journal!