Here’s a roundup of a few things that came my way on the least stressful Thanksgiving week in about 40 years:
I planned to congratulate Pike County and McComb officials for quickly working out public disagreements about the cost of housing prisoners who get arrested by the city of McComb and are held in the Pike County jail.
The city and county actually have agreed on the big issues, but some smaller ones remained. Hopefully these could be resolved. This week, it appears they were.
The main issue involved when, under the law, a prisoner arrested by an agency other than the sheriff’s department becomes the financial responsibility of the county.
McComb and Pike County pointed to attorney general opinions that gave different responses. Surprisingly, it only took a few days for them to get past that dispute.
The first reaction might be that the quick solution was a surprise, but it did go to show that the supervisors, the sheriff, the McComb city board and its police department can work together when needed.
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About the Thanksgiving holiday, I learned many years ago, as far back as the late 1980s, that it was a survival challenge as far as work was concerned.
We always got the job done, even when we used to print two papers on the day before Thanksgiving. One went to subscribers that day, and the Thursday paper, with all those sales circulars, was delivered on Wednesday night or Thursday morning.
In the last few years, the number of circulars declined rapidly. Even more important, switching to delivery through the U.S. Mail eliminated the Thanksgiving Day paper. The holiday week was easier, but as recently as 2023, I had a two-week schedule of when circulars would be assembled in advance for the Enterprise-Journal and several of the other papers that we print.
This year, there was no such schedule. None of the papers had more than two circulars. We got all our printing, inserting and deliveries done by Tuesday night. It was radically different from what I’ve been used to for so many years.
I sure do miss the revenue from those circulars, along with the extra printing during Thanksgiving. But I definitely don’t miss all the headaches that came with it.
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A few days ago, a subscriber came in with information for the obituary of a friend’s relative. We got to visiting, and he just asked me straight up: “What’s going to happen to the Enterprise-Journal? Is it going away?”
I told him, and I will tell anyone reading this, that the Enterprise-Journal is definitely not going away. But we are adjusting to some rapidly changing times.
I wrote this not too long ago: The people who prefer a printed version of the news are getting older. There are fewer of them left, and the smaller number of papers we print for each edition bears that out.
Our future lies with the computer in your home or office — or for many people, with the smartphone in their pocket. That’s how most people want to get their information today. Almost 70% of our online readers use their phones to visit our website.
The visitor said he likes the printed version and asked if we’re going to keep putting out a newspaper. The short answer is yes. But it’s getting more expensive, and print is far from the fastest way to get local news to the public. We can post a story or photo to our website literally the moment something happens. The stories in the paper are a day old, and often older than that.
Our online presence is a work in progress, but somebody is going to make a living reporting local news. There’s no reason it can’t be us.
