New Year primed with energy and change

We’re back!
We’re back and facing a 2026 that seems to be full of energy and change.
We try to run in big circles as a news organization and touch the lives of as many people as we can, while helping create a vehicle of communication throughout north Lee County.
During the election this fall, I paid close attention to some of the words that our candidates used in campaigning for local offices.
One of the things we keep hearing, and we heard again in Stephanie’s The 52627 piece on new mayor Melinda Blind, is that not everyone is getting information they need. That different strategies are needed to make sure all residents of the city, and county, get the information they need on a daily basis.
Well, that used to be the job of newspapers and radio stations and television stations. We still do that, but social media has created a new current of news.
I took Facebook off my phone about four months ago because of the constant hack attempts and the fact - not innuendo, but fact - that much of what you see is produced by artificial intelligence and cannot be taken as fact.
I can’t point to a news organization, including our own, that’s perfect. But I can’t point to any other person or entity that’s perfect either. I’m not even sure we have ever been able to point to perfection in things of substantive value.
What wins the day is perseverance - pushing through and sustaining efforts.
When we hear candidates say that communication is not good in the city, we take that to heart. We’ve heard it at county supervisors' meetings and at school board meetings. It isn’t specifically a shot at news organizations, but an overall sentiment that we have to open more avenues for people to be informed of the issues officials want them to be informed about.
In this effort you have to look to the Internet and making sure everyone has access to it, just like everyone should have access to electricity and natural gas. The Internet needs to be categorized as a utility. It’s already taxed and the government is all in on getting connectivity to every home in the country.
Then you create information banks, or links if you will, that carry your city meeting minutes, your legal notices and others' informational documents. Legal notices alone would save governments millions of dollars across the country, but would be a big hit to news organizations that count on that revenue, especially with display advertising dropping from a $50-billion-a-year industry in 2013 to a $9 billion industry in 2023, according to industry data groups. That steep drop in revenue is felt from the biggest publications to the smallest outlets.
The ability to help the communication process from governments to consumers is powered by those dollars. This seachange of advertising priorities is having a tremendous chilling effect on newsgathering. With all that being said, the only way to keep being viable is to keep pushing forward in a hyperlocal environment. And we will continue to do that.
The other piece of the puzzle is motivating the uninformed to get informed. We can’t make people read. We can’t make people attend meetings. Therefore, in the most basic of deductions, when people say they didn’t know, it’s because they weren’t concerned about knowing until something affected them, but was already in motion.
The challenge is getting those people to invest a few minutes each day on actually getting informed. You can go to the city of Fort Madison website and read minutes from meetings. News reporting is based on space and time and we don’t get to everything because we can’t get to everything. But when candidates say we need to do better, I’m not sure the constituency itself doesn’t need to do better. Communication is a partnership, or at the very least, a two-way system – sender and receiver.
Receivers have to be actively engaged in receiving. Not 24 hours a day, but maybe 15 minutes a day. Just making sure you’re informed of what’s going on around you. We will continue to do our best to bring you the news in 2026. We’ve added some things in 2025 including Stephanie’s boots-on-the-ground feature reporting. We’re hoping to expand on that and possibly add a sponsor for that program. We’ve added Natalie Nye as a news clerk and potential reporter, we’ve worked with other photographers to bring you images of your kids playing sports. These are things we can’t do on our own and these dedicated people help bring more value to this product.
We’re looking at our structure and the granular value to the readership we’ve developed. We want to know how we strengthen what we’ve built over the past 10 years while always looking at what’s best for north Lee County.
We welcome all considerations as posts under this piece whether it be on the actual PenCityCurrent.com website or the social media outlets it shows up on. Focus on this query – what does your optimized local news company look like?
In the last 10 years, we’ve never charged a subscription. We’ve had a philosophy that advertisers have a strong return on investment for informed readers. Some agree, some don’t. We know that paywalls are a source of frustration, but we’re hearing from industry experts that a $7 to $10 monthly subscription is being received well by readers as a fair price for a good product.  But we’re not convinced that’s the way to go. Suffice it to say we will be very engaged in 2026 in finding what that “way to go” is – But that’s Beside the Point.
As a rare post-script, we want to share our heartfelt condolences to the Heyland family. Jon was a supporter of our work and a friend to our family. He was never shy about reaching out to me to talk about issues he felt were important to the city and he was unabashed in his love for all people. It was something that made me think of him often. Why a man whose passion had focused on the homeless was taken from us is a question for prayer and faith, but that legacy must continue and we stand ready to help those who will carry that torch in his name.