We have 150 years of growth, and a future of innovation
Ours is a story of growth, and I am living one chapter in it.
I made an abrupt career change at age 37. After having worked for one newspaper company my entire professional career, I decided to seek out a new challenge in a place where I would have an opportunity to grow.
Throughout its well-known history, Paddock Publications and the Daily Herald Media Group has been known for growth. From a newspaper delivered by horse and buggy to a well-respected Cook County weekly newspaper to the third largest daily newspaper in the state, that growth has continued, and the people who work here, like me, have had the privilege to grow with it.
I started my career as an editor in our Elgin bureau. It was a great opportunity to start fresh in an expanding area for the Daily Herald and in a region I knew well. From those early days in a shopping center storefront, I grew as the company grew, and soon I was leading our efforts to grow our daily newspaper in new regions around the suburbs, areas of Lake County, southern Kane County and DuPage County, opening new offices, hiring new staff.
It has been clear from my first day this is a company built on expansion, change and innovation, and kept moving forward by the long-term dedication of employees who share that vision.
As Paddock Publications celebrates its 150th anniversary this month, I will be celebrating 25 years with the company next month. I have changed titles many times over the years - bureau editor, matrix manager, director of business development, vice president of sales and marketing, senior vice president, general manager. Today I am president and chief operating officer, still growing and learning new skills every day.
We are writing new chapters to our story even today. While our plans to expand to new suburbs around Chicago have slowed, we have grown and expanded our company in other ways. We have a successful weekly community news operation in central and southern Illinois, aided by a busy printing plant in Virden, a little south of Springfield.
Our Schaumburg printing plant was built to accommodate the Daily Herald brands, but today publishes many titles for a variety of commercial customers, one in northern Wisconsin. We even produce slick glossy advertising inserts and magazine-quality covers.
We have joined the digital age, a tsunami none of us could have predicted 25 years ago. Our websites and other digital media platforms and electronic newsletters continue to attract new readership - customers who value our journalism and are willing to pay to see it thrive in the future.
Not everything we have tried works. As a company we have a mantra that states "fail fast, fail cheap." It is a philosophy to not be afraid to innovate, and not be afraid to walk away from a good idea that doesn't achieve its objective.
Some of our greatest successes have grown from these innovation efforts.
More than a decade ago, we began working with our local chambers of commerce to help them with their printing needs. It started out small, creating a single chamber magazine in Arlington Heights. From that single publication, we have grown an entirely new division called Town Square Publications, which is today the largest publisher of chamber magazines, directories and maps in the United States.
Our customers stretch from coast to coast and include some of the largest cities in the country. We continue to innovate new products for our business clients and we've recently added exciting new digital components to our Town Square portfolio of products, which is now growing beyond the chamber of commerce industry.
As we look forward to future anniversary celebrations of our company, I am excited to see what the next generation of company leaders will be writing about. Hopefully it will continue to be the story of innovation, growth and success.