It isn’t easy to admit that a competitor did a better job than you did and didn’t deserve the ultimate results. But here I am.
Prompted by the recent death of former Penasee Globe reporter Jean Gallup, I hereby confess that she did a much better job of covering Middleville, Thornapple Township, Yankee Springs Township and Orageville Township than did the newspaper I edited for 19 years, the Middleville-Caledonia Sun & News.
Before I was unceremoniously shown the door at J-Ad Graphics in 2007, I was editor of the Hastings Banner and Reminder, Lakewood News, Maple Valley News and the Sun & News. I wouldn’t admit it back then, but I was spread too thin to do a quality job as a community journalist.
But the real crime was that it didn’t really matter to the unwashed masses who read the stories and examined the pictures. The Sun & News carries on to this day. The Penasee Globe went belly up almost seven years ago, banished to the graveyards of so many small town community newspapers in America these days.
I worked with Jean Gallup at J-Ad Graphics for more than a few years, with myself as editor and she as reporter. She was the very first person who showed me a digital camera and how it worked.
I never picked up on her not being satisfied with her job, but in the mid-1990s she surprised everyone by leaving her job at J-Ad to take a similar post at Penasee. I surmised that this was much like Penasee’s declaration of a business war against the Sun & News.
Penasee ultimately spread itself too thin, adding Middleville to coverage areas besides Wayland, Hopkins, Martin Dorr and Moline, which had been covered exclusively since 1884 by the Wayland Globe.
Somehow, publishers Nila Aamoth and Ron Carlson sensed that Middleville was ripe for the plucking for advertising and marketing.
I was keenly aware of the new competition, but didn’t do a whole lot to stem the tide. I had too many other irons in the fire.
Now that my weekly trips to the Then & Now Historical Library in Dorr reveal just how badly Jean Gallup scooped us, I am embarrassed. I am ashamed.
Week in and week out, Ms. Gallup wrote a lot of stories and took a lot of pictures that were welcomed by the readership of residents to the east of Wayland. By contrast, the Sun & News struggled to tell the stories of Middleville.
And what made things worse is that J-Ad didn’t really pay reporters all that well and so those hired tended to be young and inexperienced. This was contrasted by Jean Gallup’s near lifetime experience in the Middleville community. She knew everybody and she was more than familiar with the local institutions.
But her quality work and ability to shame the hometown paper didn’t really translate into anything worthwhile for Penasee. The Sun & News still picked up its advertising because it was a free paper, though Penasee was as well.
But after researching into the past, Penasee was clearly the better product for Middleville readers, yet it didn’t really matter. Though the Sun & News is still hanging around, it’s not a huge money maker in a town and school district that has shown a lot of growth.
I hate to admit it, but Penasee in this case offered a better mouse trap and it should have kicked the Sun & News to the dust bin of history. Penasee now is in the dust bin, but it simply faded like so many others.
I’d like to think Jean Gallup had a lot to do with it.
