Inside LINK is a regular column from our CEO, Lacy Starling. If you have questions you’d like Lacy to answer, email her at lacy@linknky.com.
I woke up this morning feeling grateful.
That’s not how I normally wake up. Normally, I wake up at 5:45 a.m. anxious, scanning my list of to-dos and priorities as soon as my eyes open.
But today, the last day of the year where all LINK’s staff will be in the office together, the day of our office holiday party and potluck and holiday PJ/ugly sweater day, I woke up grateful.
I’m grateful for my team. The reporters salespeople and, production folks, and contributors who make LINK what it is are incredible. It is not easy to decide, in 2023, to make a career out of journalism. The pay is lousy, the hours are terrible, public sentiment about journalists is…not great, and it takes a special kind of passion for the trade and your community to do it. And on the sales side, there are definitely easier, more lucrative sales careers than one in media advertising for a local news organization.
But in spite of those challenges, the LINK team shows up every day, full of ideas, excited to tackle the challenges we face, and passionate about the Northern Kentucky community. I am so lucky to be able to work with this team.
I’m grateful to LINK’s boards. The Managing Board has helped me work through financial and structural challenges, and our Board Chair, Greg Fischer, has been an incredible support to me as we try to figure out the business of news in 2023. This is my first experience reporting to a board, and I couldn’t ask for a better one.
The Editorial Board, a group of incredibly smart, thoughtful, caring volunteers, consistently brings meaningful conversation to our meetings and helps us see where we’re getting things right – and where we aren’t. I leave every editorial board meeting knowing something I didn’t before, and thinking differently about issues in our community.
Most of all, I’m grateful for the Northern Kentucky community. In the face of shrinking newsrooms everywhere else, NKY has decided to lean in to supporting local news. The media industry cut more than 20,000 jobs in 2023. And an average of two newspapers a week shut down in the US this year. It’s been a dire, scary, depressing year for many of our sister papers around the country.
In NKY, though, we launched a new print paper, and our newsroom continues to grow. Community members subscribed to the print paper, and donated a record amount of money to the NKY Community Journalism Fund.
There are plenty of places where people can spend or share their hard-earned money and I’m deeply grateful for the support we receive. We always need more, and I hope that if you are reading this and feel compelled, maybe you’ll consider supporting us, too.
2023 has been hard. Things I thought I knew about this business changed or were never true in the first place. There are absolutely days when it feels like we are trying to do the impossible. But then, someone stops me at the gym to tell me how much they appreciate our election coverage, or sends me an email saying that a story about housing made them aware of an issue they didn’t even know existed. Or just that one of our feature stories made them smile.
That’s why I do this – because I want to make a difference in my community. It’s why I wake up at 5:45 every day and start anxiously scanning my list.
To do this work in the place I call home is a privilege, and one I’m grateful for.
