By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
We aren’t publishing on New Year’s Day this year. Our publication day of Wednesday won’t fall on New Year’s Day until 2025. But we’re pretty close, and this will be our final issue of this year.
And, oddly enough, looking back to 1925 we found that the Carter County Herald published on New Year’s Day then – exactly 100 years from when we’ll have our first issue with a January 1 cover date.
The Herald took that opportunity to note their long presence in the community, at 23 years of publication, and to harangue local businessmen for not supporting the paper more through advertising.
While we have a while before we reach a milestone like the Herald, the end of this year marks our first full year of producing the paper – every week for 52 weeks in 2021 – and our next paper, on January 5, 2022, will mark our third year of existence since putting out our first paper in June of 2020.
While we also rely heavily on “foreign advertising” for our revenue, we can’t complain about our local advertisers the way the Herald did. While we would always like more local advertising, we realize the locally-owned business market isn’t the same today as it was in 1925. We’re also blessed with a number of local advertisers (including the sponsor of this weekly column) who support our publication regularly, and we’re thankful for all of them.
We’re also thankful to you, our subscribers and newsstand purchasers. We won’t be sending a collection agent to your door after our January 5 issue to collect for the year, the way the Herald announced they were doing in their issue from January 8, 1925, but we do appreciate your support as well. We do this for you, and we couldn’t do it without you. As we march on toward our two-year milestone this June, we hope you’ll continue to stick with us for your local news.
Happy New Year.
The Carter County Times
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com
