I was looking through old papers for the Turn Back the Clock feature that appears in each paper when I came across the front page story from 10 years ago this week about a guy named Jason Patterson being named the new managing editor of The Yazoo Herald.
Ten Years? How the heck did that happen so fast?
I turned 40 on June 23 so I have spent my 30s at this newspaper. Even though the past decade has gone by much faster than I ever could have imagined, there have been so many changes in my life. I got married, bought a house, and we had three children. Five years ago I became the publisher and took on many more responsibilities.
Ten years is the longest I’ve ever been in the same job, unless you count working on my father’s farm growing up, but that wasn’t really voluntary employment. The truth is that I’m just as excited about it now as I was when I started.
I believe that God has a plan for our lives, and that each of us was created with certain talents. I am convinced that part of the plan for me was to work for this newspaper because of the way the doors opened for me to come back home to Yazoo.
Ten years ago I was the managing editor of The Bolivar Commercial, a daily newspaper in Cleveland, and I was very happy there. Cleveland was a nice town, and I was always getting positive feedback about the paper.
I had worked my way up quickly in a few years. I started as a staff writer, then served as business editor, then was promoted to sports editor, and then was named managing editor when the longtime editor retired. As far as I was concerned, I had it made.
During that time, I started dating a girl named Jamie Kemp. I first met her in a journalism class at Delta State University, and we later worked together at the newspaper. I was crazy about her. I had never felt like that about anyone before.
One day Jamie got a job offer from The Clarion Ledger that was simply too good to turn down. She moved to work in Jackson, and my heart left with her. All of a sudden my job didn’t seem so perfect anymore. It was as if someone had turned the lights off in the building.
I kept working hard, but I started looking for opportunities closer to Jackson.
The way I ended up getting hired in Yazoo City is why I’m convinced it was meant to be. There was an opening for a managing editor for a paper in Madison County, and I interviewed for the job. The interview went great. The job was mine if I wanted it, but the only catch was that I would have to wait until the current managing editor moved on, and it wasn’t clear exactly when that would be. It might be two or three months. For some reason I felt uneasy about it. That’s when the idea of contacting The Yazoo Herald came to me.
I read nearly every issue of The Herald, and I noticed that I had not seen any articles from longtime managing editor Vernon Sikes in the paper for awhile. I wondered if he had retired.
I already had examples of my work and my resume, and I even had on a tie. What would it hurt if I stopped by The Herald on my way back to Cleveland?
I called and asked to speak to Gary Andrews. I only knew him from reading his columns in the paper at the time.
Gary invited me to stop by, and we hit it off right away. The Herald couldn’t pay me as much as I was making at the larger daily newspaper, but Gary promised me that if I would come aboard he would teach me the business side of newspaper operations so that I would be in a good position to be the next publisher when he retired. He said that would probably be just a few years away.
I sensed that Gary was a good man, and my instincts were right. He taught me many things that I was totally clueless about before, and he was always patient when I was sometimes a slow learner.
Gary was also totally true to his word. It was five years to the day after I started that he retired. Thanks to his guidance, I was ready to become the next publisher. There’s probably nowhere in the world I could have learned as much so quickly.
About a year after I started at The Herald, Jamie was unhappy at her job in Jackson. She preferred the smaller newspaper environment to the large corporate paper. She joined us and quickly made her mark on the paper.
One funny memory I have about those early days was explaining to Jamie that at this small paper we had to wear a lot of hats. On the same day you’re doing some serious journalism you might also be typing a child’s birthday announcement and a calender date for a bake sale, and you better not ever forget that all of these things are equally important in the eyes of different readers.
“By the way, you’re gonna need to write a weekly column,” I said.
“I can’t do that; what would I write about,” Jamie responded.
We now get more feedback on Jamie’s column than anything else in the paper.
Ten years at The Yazoo Herald have been very rewarding, and I hope I’m blessed with many more. It certainly hasn’t always been easy, but nothing worth doing ever is.
In my first column on this page 10 years ago, I promised to build on this paper’s strengths and provide the best community newspaper I can.
I’m renewing that promise today.
