For two years, we worked hard to limit the changes on the website while also modernizing our offerings.”

Well over a decade ago now, I left my first newspaper job to deliver pizzas. Although I had a degree in journalism and about four years under my belt at the Ogdensburg Journal, changes at the company led me to seek greener pastures.

While my professors have served me well, it’s true that there is nothing quite like learning on the job. I was fortunate enough to learn from Jim Reagen, Chuck Kelly and Ryne Martin and worked with a dozen other reporters and editors in St. Lawrence County, but in truth I made more money delivering pizzas.

I believe it was around 2012 when I read that NorthCountryNow.com was looking for an editorial assistant and I decided to apply.

At the time there was only one edition of the paper. The paper featured one or two “bylined” stories a week. There was a big emphasis on events listings and dutiful postings of community organization’s work. The website was largely an aggregate site, that is to say it was mostly links to other websites.

In truth, the drudgery of working as an editorial assistant was a bit mind-numbing compared to my previous journalism experience, which had me battling with state officials, local municipal leaders and covering a barrage of meetings that were sometimes heated. I’d often be assigned to cover interesting community groups and organization events I’d never known existed.

In time, then News Editor Craig Freilich convinced my publisher Bill Shumway that I needed to be writing original content, rather than entering data.

It wasn’t long after that I began writing more and more news stories. Soon we added another body to the newsroom. Over the next few years, we grew the small operation into a news organization that was covering meetings and writing original stories. We launched a Massena-Ogdensburg Edition of the paper in 2013.

We added to the advertising and news staff and slowly became the dominant news source in the area. Our website now featured only a few links and was full of original content, local events and press releases.

We eventually out-grew the small office on Depot Street in Potsdam and moved to a new location on Clarkson Avenue. We continued to grow our news staff.

Our model was succeeding in an industry that was seeing massive problems nationwide. Across the country, newspapers were folding or being purchased by hedge funds and gutted.

Of course, then the pandemic struck. Most non-digital industries took a major hit due to forced closures and regulations as did their ability to advertise.

My publisher worked to find new revenues. We launched “Spotlight” pages. We created a paid edition of our paper to allow us to collect revenue by running legal notices, which also allowed the majority of county residents to have access to notices placed by local governments.

We also joined the many other papers across the nation in attempting to capitalize on online revenue to keep things afloat. We asked the community to help us fund the website through subscriptions. We hoped our product was strong enough to garner that support.

We tried to keep the cost as low as possible – the goal was to provide news coverage to the public at a cost of less than 1 cup of coffee per week.

Fortunately, many of you answered that call and that’s what has allowed us to retain our newsroom.

It’s appreciated. Many local news organizations throughout the nation have not been so fortunate.

Now one of the biggest questions we’ve been asked since we launched the new site last week is "why did we do it?" The answer is simple really. It’s because we had to. The Drupal software version our old website was built on was no longer going to be supported.

We looked at a variety of options to update the website and found Creative Circle Media Solutions which was based in the United States and focused specifically on building websites for newspapers, a rare find in this day and age.

For two years, we worked hard to limit the changes on the website while also modernizing our offerings. Driving our web designers insane, we tried to keep our NorthCountryNow.com feel while incorporating the changes.

We know change is difficult.

It’s been tough on our end as well. While social media often brings out the harshest criticism, we’ve also received a host of compliments. We expected as much as there are things we like and dislike about the new site as well.

Somewhere in all this mess I was named News Editor. It’s been quite the journey.

At the end of the day I chose this career because I believe in the fourth estate. Informing citizens is important and celebrating the achievements of people in our area is important.

The new changes to the website should allow us to do a better job in many areas. We have an improved events calendar, we have the ability to display photos better, we have a website that is responsive to the type of device that’s being used and we have many back end improvements which we hope translates to more time for reporting.

The truth is that this organization has been in a state of constant change since before I started here and it’s remained that way ever since.

It’s what’s allowed us to succeed and we’ll need to continue to change to meet the demands of the industry, which is struggling nationwide.

 For those of you that have supported North Country This Week over the years, we can’t thank you enough. Your subscriptions and readership keeps our newsroom running. Thanks for sticking with us.