By: Forrest R. Church, Publisher
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
I think a lot about the benefits and the concerns of social media, often wondering about the long-term impact it has on our youth. I see positives and negatives with these platforms. After more than thirty years in this business using them, I am not always sure which side wins.
Wait, I think I just called myself old. Social media was not even around when I started in this line of work, so the thirty years claim may be a bit of a stretch.
Last time I checked, the combined following The Village Reporter has built across social media platforms sits in the mid-thirty-thousand range. When you stop and consider how rural this part of the country is, that number is frankly remarkable.
On the flip side — and this is purely personal — if it were not for my work at the newspaper, I would step away from social media tomorrow. The platforms themselves are powerful tools, and we use them because they work. But the drama wears me out.
You likely know where I am going with this — the social media keyboard warriors. There’s no shortage of brave folks who will tell you exactly what they think of the school board, the city council, the mayor, or the latest county commissioner vote — from a smartphone in their kitchen. Face to face when bumping into them in the community, those same folks often have nothing to say. That part has worn thin on me.
Everybody has an opinion when they can hide behind a phone. Show up at the actual council meeting where the same issue is on the agenda, and the same brave folks are nowhere to be found. The chairs sit empty. The microphone goes unused.
A conversation that could have happened in five minutes face to face — neighbor to neighbor, over coffee — gets dragged across a Facebook comment thread for three days instead. Nothing gets resolved. We all just end up a little angrier than we were the day before.
Let me say this plainly. To the folks who DO show up, who walk to the microphone, sit through the agenda, attend the township meeting, write the letter to the editor with their own name on it: even when I do not personally agree with a single word coming out of your mouth, thank you. That is the correct route. Showing up in person, with your name attached to your opinion, is worth more than dozens of Facebook comments. We need more of that, not less.
But every once in a while something comes across my social media feed that reminds me these platforms can still do good. A few days ago my wife Casey shared a video that cracked me up. A comedian was making the case, on behalf of the moms in his life, that whoever scheduled Mother’s Day for early May picked the absolute worst time of year to try and hand moms a day of rest. He walked through everything they juggle in that single month: school plays, recitals, playoffs, field trips, final projects, graduation announcements, Memorial Day plans.
The reward for surviving all of it, he said, is summer break, three months of bored, hungry kids with strong opinions about whatever is in the kitchen. His whole point was that the calendar slot we picked for Mother’s Day lands inside one of the most chaotic stretches of the year for the very people the holiday is supposed to honor. One Sunday brunch does not begin to cover what moms actually pull off in the surrounding thirty days.
The bit cracked me up. But it stuck for a reason that probably had nothing to do with what the comedian intended. As I sat there laughing, I realized he could just as easily have been describing what May and June look like at The Village Reporter. Even after all these years, we have not perfected the rhythm of this time of year, and we keep looking for ways to make the hectic publication process smoother.
May and June at The Village Reporter are what I imagine a restaurant kitchen is like during the dinner rush, except the dinner rush lasts eight straight weeks. Most of you reading this in our small country towns understand exactly what I mean. May is the month where the volume on every part of life triples at once. Let me walk you through what that looks like inside our office.
Every year, the newspaper produces a graduation tribute section (now broken down into two sections) honoring the seniors graduating from the high schools across Williams and Fulton counties. It is one of the most meaningful things we publish. Parents and grandparents save it. Seniors keep their copy long after they leave home. People walk into the office years later asking if we still have a copy of the year their kid graduated.
What a lot of you may not realize, sitting on the reader side of this newspaper, is that the graduation tribute does not come together in May. Our team starts on it months earlier. It starts with reaching out to every high school in our coverage area: Bryan, Montpelier, Stryker, Edgerton, Edon, Hilltop, Evergreen, Archbold, Wauseon, Pettisville, Fayette, Delta, Swanton, and North Central. We ask each one for their senior roster, class officers, top students, scholar-athletes, and commencement and baccalaureate details. Their class motto, colors, flower, advisor. Every detail. We want it all, and we want it spelled correctly.
Then come the photographs. Senior portraits, class officer photos, group shots when the classes decide to take them — and honestly, it’s disappointing when some choose not to. Most of those photos come together because the staff and secretaries at every one of these schools answer our calls and emails on top of an already-packed year-end schedule. They deserve a public thank-you here, because the tribute does not happen without them. None of this is glamorous on their end. If even one senior gets left out of the section, that family will remember it for the rest of their lives — and they will be right to.
Alongside the photos come the senior surveys. Where are you headed after graduation? College, trade school, the military, the workforce, the family farm, or something else? Tell us in your own words. The answers come back as a beautiful patchwork of where Northwest Ohio is sending its eighteen-year-olds.
While the school side of the section is being assembled, the ad side is being sold to anybody who wants to congratulate the Class of 2026. Some of these advertisers have been buying space in our graduation tribute year after year, going back decades. They know what the section means around here, and they want their name on the page next to those kids.
Then the personal tributes start arriving, the ones a lot of you reading this have purchased yourselves. Mom and Dad for a daughter. Grandparents for a grandson. An aunt for the niece she helped raise. Each one arrives with a wish, a photo, a paid invoice, and a deadline, and each needs matched to the right senior, school, and page. Photos that were not attached have to be tracked down. Misspelled names have to be fixed.
Layout is its own animal. Every school’s pages get built in InDesign one at a time, respecting each school’s colors and identity. Every senior portrait sized correctly. Every name checked against the master list, first and last, exactly as the parents spell it. Three, four, five rounds before the section ships.
Then it has to actually print, along with distribution to over 70 locations throughout the two-county area, plus about 14 post office drops the last time I checked.
If the graduation tribute were our only spring project, it would be plenty. But as the famous infomercial used to say, “But wait, there’s more!”
Spring sports head into the postseason in early May. Softball, baseball, track and field, tennis. Sectionals turn into districts, regionals, and state finals. Our photographers and reporters try to cover as many games as humanly possible. On any given day, two of our local teams might be at tournaments in opposite directions while a track regional pulls a third reporter to a third site.
If you read my column from a couple weeks back about our newly expanded township coverage, you already know about another layer we added to all of this earlier in the year. We are now covering meetings across every township in Williams and Fulton counties. Twenty-four townships, each running a meeting or two a month. May and June do not pause that calendar. Trustees still meet, road projects still get debated, drainage issues still need brought up.
May ends with Memorial Day weekend, which means the paper covers services. That sounds simple. It is not. Every veterans’ organization in our coverage area holds some kind of remembrance, whether at the VFW posts, the American Legion posts, or the AMVETS chapters. We send photographers and writers to as many of these as our staff can reach — never every one, but as many as we can.
All of which brings me back to that social media post Casey shared with me. The comedian was making the case that May is impossibly busy for the moms in his life. Too busy to ever be the right time of year to hand somebody a day of rest. The way he stacked up the recitals and the field trips and the final projects and the graduation announcements made me laugh out loud at my own desk because I was reflecting heavily. So when I say his bit cracked me up, I mean it on two levels. Once for the moms nodding along, recognizing their own May. Once for our team members, looking at the schedule for May/June and recognizing the chaos.
Which is why, even though I still get tired of the drama on those platforms, I want to give social media credit where it is due. Without it, I would never have come across last week’s post that gave me a needed laugh when I needed it most.
That is it for this week. I’d love to hear from you. As always, feel free to reach out to me at publisher@thevillagereporter.com or via mail at 115 Broad Street, Montpelier, Ohio 43543.