BY LAWRENCE SOBCZAK
PUBLISHER
This week The Record is celebrating its eighth year of publication.
This newspaper published its first edition on Dec. 1, 2015 in response to the closing of both The Romeo Observer and The Armada Times that summer.
The newspaper you are holding in your hands is our 408th edition.
People in the community want a newspaper to report on local news and advertisers want an effective way to reach their neighbors and customers.
Besides exclusive local news coverage, sports, obituaries and police news, we offer the most comprehensive calendar of local events, hands down.
Since 2015, we have developed six glossy magazines that are inserted into the newspaper — one for every season plus The Community Guide and The Peach Festival Magazine.
We also print a special section highlighting The Armada Fair and two special sections for the graduating classes at Armada High School and Romeo High School.
Our website has been in operation since day one and it now contains an electronic library of more than 11,500 items.
In our first year, we started out by publishing twice a month while we built up the newspaper.
It soon switched to one every two weeks. By April 2016, we began publishing weekly.
That means our first year only has 43 editions.
The following seven years we published 52 editions — even during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 when many businesses and newspapers trimmed back their offerings.
Not us — rather than panic or complain about things that were out of our control —Chris Rose and I came up with a plan in March 2020 and executed it with success.
Every week our readers still received news that was especially important during a troubling time.
I am very proud this newspaper was able to keep publishing throughout the pandemic without a hitch thanks to its staff, readers and advertisers who all stood by it.
The Record also provides jobs — many of the people that help get the newspaper out to you every week used to contribute to the two defunct newspapers.
Award-winning reporter Stacy Sobotka and myself have journalism degrees and Nicholas Wyllie and Danielle Blessing hold degrees in related fields.
You may recognize Jan Wyllie or even know her from when she was ad director at The Observer — she now builds a lot of the ads you see in the newspaper.
I first met Ad Director and General Manager Chris Rose, right after issue #1 hit the streets. Drawing on his background as a multi-media advertising executive, he makes sure that there are enough ads in each week’s newspaper. Utilizing his degree in economics from Wayne State University, he makes sure we stay on budget and on target to ensure this newspaper remains a viable enterprise.
Photographer Mike Nicley has also been here since the start. He originally began contributing photos to The Observer that he took while his kids were in middle school sports. His kids are now all grown but you will see him at games and community events snapping his next batch of award-winning photos.
Our delivery driver tells me each week how much she loves being out in the community, meeting people and bringing them something everyone loves.
Everyone that has ever contributed to this newspaper in one way or another has shared the same sentiment with me.
In this week of Thanksgiving, I’m thankful that I get to do something I truly always wanted to do, that there are others that love their jobs and the readers and the advertisers love the newspaper.
As we begin working on the ninth volume of this newspaper, I feel the momentum continue to build.
We are actively working on ways to expand our news coverage for our readers and reach for our advertisers. Keep picking up the newspaper each week and we’ll keep reporting the news to you.
