This week I’m saying so long to the readers of The Citizen, and saying hello to its new editor/publisher — Ellie White Stevens.
Ellie is a well-known name in local and regional marketing, but I’m proud to say she got her start by becoming our star advertising sales representative at The Citizen back in the early 2000s. She worked for The Citizen for seven years before she took her vibrant talents and started her own ad agency, Dirt1x.
She’s come full circle now, as she takes the lead at returning The Citizen to its marketing roots. She respects the role of The Citizen in Fayette and Coweta Counties and she will work to increase its role in the lives of everyday citizens by broadening its approach and expanding its diversity of contributors.
I could not be more pleased in calling her my successor.
This local news website was birthed first as a 16-page broadsheet newspaper back in February 1993. There was no internet then, no websites, just ink on paper produced by a half-dozen or so under-paid wretches working in the defunct Fayette Sun newspaper’s vacant offices where we typed our stories and built print ads on the original 9-inch-screen black-and-white-only Macintosh computers.
The weekly paper started via a loan from direct marketing expert Frank Cawood, which we repaid after a few years. I was publisher and Dave Hamrick was the first managing editor, until he died in 2002 “at age 51 as he was playing soccer in a local over-40 league, after getting the paper out earlier that Tuesday. After getting the paper out.” I wrote that in a 2013 column.
In my first column in The Citizen more than three decades ago, I wrote, “We will provide perspective on local government actions that will affect you, your children and your property. We expect to encourage responsible citizenship among our readers and responsive service from our public officials. Such encouragement might take the form of applause at times, of criticism at others. In all cases we stand accountable to you, our readers.”
At our peak in the early 2000s, I signed checks for more than 35 full- and part-time employees. Then the Great Recession hit, and that number dwindled as newspapers became the 21st Century version of horse-drawn carriages.
We bowed to the inevitable the last week in August 2019, when we distributed our last print newspaper and shifted all operations to our digital website, TheCitizen.com.
Our first html-coded website was in November 1996 with a few stories lifted from the print product. But as newspapers across America discovered, a news website brings in a fraction of the print revenue. We went all-online beginning in September 2019, and then came Covid.
Everyone’s world changed. And by March 10, 2020, with one case of Covid reported in Fayette County, The Citizen onlne began producing what became daily stories about the public and private battles against the virus. That ended in May 2022, with a tally of at least 278 Covid deaths in Fayette.
The founder was a mere lad of 49 when The Citizen started in 1993. Now, 31 years later, the lad has inexplicably turned into an old man of 80, who finds himself slightly beyond retirement age.
With encouragement (read: push) from his wife, he looks forward to the next chapter, part of which will be found in a Substack newsletter that will NOT be about local news. More about that later.
Maybe from time to time, I’ll be writing some personal columns on the site, but they will be — as Ellie said — when I have something to say.
