Folks, let’s be honest. We’ve got the makings of the dream team, right here at the Yellowstone County News! As time goes on, we’ll continue to get better, bigger and even more noticed in Yellowstone County. So, we won 10 awards last weekend at the annual conference. Four First place awards, Four Second-place awards and Two third-place awards. Last year, we only won three total awards so we’re happy to see the fruits of our labor.
I’m referring to our staff who knows their job and is perfecting it each week to the point that we are now getting even more recognition from the Montana Newspaper Association and the 10 awards our staff won last weekend at the annual convention. We are starting to perfect our product, process and the service we provide while allowing ourselves opportunities to become even better.
For example, we have great reporters like Evelyn Pyburn who won an award last weekend for an editorial she wrote last year entitled, “Destroying the individual, Tax increment finance, etc.” She has been reporting and writing for about 40 years.
She is what I want our new reporter Parker Jimison looking to and learning from so that he can become as good as her in his reporting. I see a bright future in his writings as she keeps getting better and better each week. And that goes for all our staff here at YCN.
Our columnists like Krayton Kerns, Carl Wolf, Jennifer Merecki and our other contributors add to the success of our newspaper. In fact, Carl Wolf’s Outdoors column won second place in one of his outdoors columns where he and I have our common banter back and forth. Our former production specialist Kate Teza helped win 2-first place awards with her graphics design experience.
On another note, I was honored to present to my peers in statewide advertising and what we are doing at YCN to help our industry statewide. So, thank you to our statewide association for inviting me to talk at the convention about statewide advertising.
I’m also excited to help the MNA Advertising Board as one of the newest members, and I hope I can bring what I can to help our industry and all 85 Montana newspapers in general.
Finally, do you see a bigger tip of the iceberg and direction we are going at Yellowstone County News? Then to think we will be adding more to our newspaper this fall once we start publishing all the school pages for the high schools means even more. I just hope more businesses, entities and subscribers sign up to get our newspaper each week as we will need more advertisers, subscribers, etc, to pull this off.
Until then, see you in the paper.
JDM
