I know what you are thinking: Hmmm, there is something different about this issue of What’s Up Yukon.
Allow me to unburden you: the very fact that you are reading this paper right now is different. You see, we used to be biweekly … and now we are weekly.
We understand that Hallmark doesn’t make a card for that, but we will know how happy you are with this decision when we check to see how many papers were picked up at our 138 locations.
That means you will get What’s Happening listings twice as often and twice as fresh. And since many of my writers have agreed to contribute weekly, you will get twice as many of your favourite columns to read.
But I know that you are wondering how I can crank out twice as many of these missives a year? I’ll be fine … for the first few weeks. Then I might be scraping the barrel a bit with musings on the small questions of the universe, such as, in hair-shampoo commercials, why do women wear makeup in the shower?
The decision was made to go weekly in our usual What’s Up Yukon manner: we were chatting. Then Tammy Beese, the publisher, spent half the night running the numbers while Mark Beese and I wondered if this was a case of “Be careful of what you wish for?”
OK, we are all adults here, right?
I can tell you that the size of this or any paper is not determined by the editor. The advertising department tells me how many pages I have to work with and then I place my stories on the pages.
Mark and Tammy have an easier time selling advertising on a weekly basis than a biweekly. Managers and business owners think in terms of weeks, not half-months. Their sales are weekly, their work schedules are weekly and they like to buy weekly ads.
How many of you have stared at the calendar and asked yourselves, is this a compost day or a garbage day?
See?
Now, the No. 1 question I am asked is, “What did you mean by that?”
OK, you didn’t need to know that. I should have gone straight to No. 2: “Do you have enough stories to fill a weekly paper?”
Have a look at Page 7 and 9. We now have two pages of What’s Happening Listings. In large part this is because of Josephine Holmes, who gathers them for me. Since she takes so much pride in catching every possible event offered by a non-profit organization, this feature has almost doubled in size.
But the events have to be there in the first place so, yeah, there is enough happening out there to fill these pages.
To find the time, to literally handle twice the workload, I hired Josephine to be my assistant editor. Since she is better trained at copyediting than I, and she really enjoys working with the writers, she will take on those duties.
That frees me up Mondays and Tuesdays to actually write. I love it.
And I won’t be jamming as much as I can into each page. My graphic designer, Omaar Reyna, loves this because he can make the photographs larger and use more white space to keep the pages “accessible.”
For writers in the Yukon, there is now $14,000 more being paid out each year. That’s gotta be good.
It is amazing to me that, just four years ago, Tammy and I shared an office and Dan Sokolowski worked from his home in Ontario laying out the paper and preparing ads.
Mark quit his job and joined us a couple of years ago, Monica Garcia took over administration part time, now full time, Paulette Comeau and Bryan Gartner round out the graphic design department and, it finally happened: I walked into the office one day and didn’t recognize somebody. It was Bobbi Rhodes, our new advertising rep.
Well, keep it up Yukon … ’cause we got you covered.
