Editor’s note: This post is the first of what I hope will be many such columns by Jennifer Savage.  Those who remember the Parkesburg Post will recall Jennifer’s work first as a reporter then as a weekly columnist.  While I appreciated her work as a reporter, it was through her weekly columns about life’s many struggles and victories that I really got to know her as a person. It was those columns and the sensitivity and humanity of her observations that caused me to doggedly encourage her to write a regular column for Parkesburg Today.   Welcome back Jen!

By Jennifer Savage

It happened again just this past week: I’m out someplace and somebody comments to me about missing the Parkesburg Post Newspaper.  “It’s never coming back, is it?” the cashier said/asked.  “I don’t think so,” I affirmed.  “I really miss that paper,” the cashier replies.

It’s a sentiment shared by most, if not all, of the people who live in the Parkesburg/Octorara School District area.  It is also a sentiment I share.  It will be five years ago this May since I was the editor of the Parkesburg Post Ledger and four years since the weekly newspaper I spent eleven years, for better or worse (depending on a person’s view), honing my chosen craft, closed.  I know… I can hardly believe it myself.  Where has the time gone?

More importantly, though, where have all of our local newspapers gone?  It really is very sad that we don’t have a local source for our school and community news.  While websites like Parkesburg Today are a great way to whet that appetite, they certainly don’t satisfy the void not having our own newspaper has left.

I hear it every place I go — standing in the check-out line at Wal-Mart, strolling the local fairgrounds, even sitting in the chair at the local salon.  “Can I just tell you how much I loved the Post and how much I miss it?” is how it often starts before trailing off into a lamentation of the lack of news being generated of our local sports teams, school district milestones, and community highlights.  To sum up all those feelings, I agree that it, in a word, STINKS!

I am often asked if I miss the paper.  The answer is “yes”… I miss the interaction with the different facets of the community I used to have.  I miss the people I used to work with.  I miss the “rush” I used to get upon seeing the newly printed paper at Wawa every Thursday morning.  Finally, I miss writing.

And the answer is “no”… I don’t miss the job itself.  After 11 years, I was burned out.  My life centered around meetings — borough council meetings, township board meetings, school board meetings, etc.  Every time my friends called to see about getting together, they always prefaced it with, “Do you have a meeting tonight?”  And though I, for the most part, enjoyed the interaction with the different local officials, after 11 years the grind just did me in.  I was tired — even tired of writing — when I first left the paper.

I started my current job at just a few days after leaving the Post and the first two months it felt like I was on a much-needed vacation from the newspaper.  That’s why I didn’t still continue doing articles when I first left — I needed a break and I didn’t miss it at all, including writing.  Then, as time went by, it was like, ‘I miss writing.’  So, I went back as a freelancer — with a clear understanding with the Senior Editor that I got to pick and choose the stories I did.  I couldn’t just be assigned stories by the new editor, which may or may not have been fair to the new editor, but with 11 years under my belt, I was going to darn well use my “seniority” and clout with the senior editor.

But not being there full-time anymore didn’t mean I was any less shocked or impacted by the decision to close down all of the weekly community newspapers, save for one or two.  It was definitely sad, especially in terms of readership the Parkesburg Post was one of the stronger ones.  To just arbitrarily shut them all down seemed unfair, but, like anything else, at the end of the day, the newspaper business is just that — it’s a business and the bottom line is what matters the most.

I used to be the go-to person for my friends, particularly my local ones, to find out what was going on with particular developments or what the police were doing about problems in the park.  Now, when I’m asked and I’m like, “Ugh…I don’t know,” they don’t understand why.  I remind them I’m not a reporter anymore and I’m not in “the loop.”  Do I miss being in the know?  To some degree, yes, so some may wonder why I didn’t move onto another newspaper after the Post shut down.  Become a freelancer like some of my former co-workers?  My answer is always the same — I don’t want to cover meetings anymore and that is essentially what a freelancer does.  In any job, you have to pay “your dues” and I feel like I have done that.

But I enjoy writing, even if it’s just my own writing I do for myself.  I used to write stories all the time; at home growing up, during class… I have various pieces of loose-leaf paper with stories started, but never finished.  Various journals started and stopped — at least the journal entries are dated.  All writing coaches will tell any writer that they need to write a little bit every day, but when I was at the newspaper I found that hard to do.  After all, I wrote for a living.  The last thing I wanted to do was come home and write.  I now find I really have to be in the “mood”, which, unfortunately, doesn’t strike all that often.

Ken Knickerbocker, the founder of this site, first asked me about writing for it almost a year ago and, while it was something I was interested in, I just couldn’t seem to get started or get my writing groove going again.  When the new year began, I was finally like, “Jenn, you just need to take the bull by the horn and do it.”  At long last I am.  I always enjoyed doing my column at the paper, Peripheral Vision, and always received positive feedback from people in the community.  They’d always tell me how much they loved my column while hating others.  So this will be a start of a column/blog type venture with Parkesburg Today.

While it’s not the same as writing for a newspaper and I know it can never truly take the place of the Post Ledger, I do hope you will give the website a chance and enjoy these articles as much as you did the newspaper.

I will need you, the readers’, help with truly getting if off the ground — I need a column name.  Any ideas?  I don’t want to call it ‘Peripheral Vision’ again since this is a brand new, fresh venture separate from the newspaper (though the column I’m sure will read a lot like the original one).  Please send me your name suggestions through this website or my personal email — savareds@yahoo.com – and thanks for your support over the years.

Also don’t give up hope for another local newspaper.  I truly believe that at some point and time there will be another “Parkesburg Post”.