Behind the Curtain: Starting a paper during a pandemic

Daily Herald Editor John Lampinen called me one afternoon in May with a proposal: We were going to be expanding our reach to the North Shore - specifically, two weekly papers covering Northbrook and Glenview.

Would I be interested in taking on the editor role?

The first issue was going on the press in two weeks so we had a lot of work to do.

In many ways, it was a natural fit. These are two towns that have been very much a part of the Northwest suburbs' heritage.

But at the time, the only things I knew about them was that John Hughes was from one of them (I now know it's Northbrook!) and some funny stories from a co-worker who lives in Glenview.

We were in the middle of a global pandemic. We couldn't go meet people in these towns we'd never covered. Zoom, emails and phone calls were the best we could do.

Thankfully, my staff - Joe Lewnard and Dave Oberhelman - and I had an entire newsroom to help us get started.

As Dave points out, the remote scenario has not changed a primary element of communication with sources - pounding the telephone. Being a local sports reporter for years, he learned long ago that that is a key tool to maintaining communication and covering a beat.

"Having a solid and growing list of contact numbers was a familiar and welcome component of covering a new place and new people," Dave said. "Email? The same thing; sources occasionally respond better to one method over the other.

"Zoom occasionally takes its lumps - "Zoom fatigue," occasionally spotty transmission, user error. But Zoom has proved to be invaluable as nearly every board meeting spanning all civic bodies has needed to rely on remote broadcasts in lieu of face-to-face meetings."

We wanted to be careful not to write about these towns as if we just discovered them, Daily Herald-splaining Northbrook and Glenview to people who had been there much longer than we had.

And here's the thing: It wasn't just that we had to put together two newspapers. We had to put together two great newspapers and find a way to differentiate ourselves from the competition.

These had to be papers that residents would find useful and that would reflect the quality the Daily Herald has brought to the suburbs for almost 150 years.

So here we are. It's been almost six months. I feel lucky to have what's turned out to be a dream job. And the paper? We still have our moments.

But overall, as Joe would say, "We've got an A+ product here."