When my daughter, Catherine, was two, I was a pretty smug parent. I’d heard so much about the “terrible twos,” and my kid was honestly pretty great at that age. Easygoing, funny, loving – I figured I was the best parent on the planet, and I had it all figured out.

No one told me about threenagers. As soon as she turned three, my sweet little toddler turned into a total rage-monster. She stopped listening, started sassing, and generally made my life miserable. I staggered into her fourth birthday party humbled, exhausted and just happy to have survived.

As I look back on last year at LINK—the year between when we turned three and Sunday, when we turned four—I feel much the same way. I came into this year of business thinking we had it pretty well figured out. Our processes were smooth, sales were increasing and our reporting was better than ever. I felt like we were heading into our best year ever.

Reader, we were not. Instead, LINK turned into a real threenager and this year has been a struggle.

From an editorial perspective, we’re still doing incredible work. The reporting and editing team is turning out great work, day after day. I’m so proud of what they’ve done and how they are telling the story of our community.

The business side has been a very different story. (And without the business side doing well, LINK doesn’t exist.) As many of you know, LINK relies on advertising and sponsorship revenue to support the majority of our operations. If ad sales fall, it affects our entire operation.

This year, economic uncertainty led many companies to pause advertising spend or cut what they were planning to spend across the board. And since 2025 is not an election year in Kentucky, we were not able to raise money through political spending. That created a perfect storm of lower earned revenue in a year when we needed to be flat or better.

In addition to revenue being slower than projected, our costs have gone up. The paper that we use to print our newspapers comes from Canada, and while paper has so far been exempt from import tariffs, the price of the paper itself has increased this year.

Postage fees to mail the papers have also gone up. Not to mention all the daily costs of running a business – everything from heating our office to putting (the cheapest possible) coffee in the office, Mr. Coffee machine has become more expensive.

As I always tell my salespeople, you can’t hold people down and make them spend money, so we had to get more creative and offer advertisers more ways to reach the community. We launched our LINK Reader’s Choice Awards. We now have Digital Agency services. And next year, we’re going to start printing and mailing a Welcome Guide to everyone who buys a house in NKY.

Because we’re committed to this—to giving NKY the voice it deserves. When we started four years ago, Michael Monks, Mark Collier and I did not think this was going to be easy. We knew it was going to be hard, but we also knew it was going to be worth it. Our community deserves a news organization that focuses on what’s happening here, in the three counties we cover.

And if you agree that LINK is important, you can help, too. Think of it as a birthday present, and a celebration of us getting out of our threenager era. There are a number of ways you can support our mission:

Just like my daughter eventually did, I know LINK is exiting our threenager stage. This next year is going to be great because we’ve worked so hard to diversify, create new opportunities, and continue to bring independent, solutions-focused news to our community. And if you can help us a little now that we’ve turned four, we would greatly appreciate it.

Lacy Starling is LINK’s president and CEO. Click here to read more Inside LINK columns from Lacy and LINK nky Executive Editor, Meghan Goth.

Lacy is the president and CEO of LINK nky. Email her at lacy@linknky.com Twitter.