Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Upon reading Dick Yarbrough’s column for the week, we at The Post- Searchlight couldn’t agree more that is has been a difficult year, but we have so much to be thankful for.

This year we saw many changes throughout the country and internally as well.

When COVID-19 disrupted the way everyone operated their day to day lives, we quickly panicked. We felt a need to report the news on all things COVID related, but we also realized due to everything closing and being canceled, there wasn’t much else to report on. This realization brought new challenges in the newsroom and ad department.

Ad revenues were down, and almost every COVID topic had been covered. From hand-sewn masks, to curfews and antibody tests, we had run the COVID well dry. This was not only a problem at our paper, but papers across the country as well. Seeing this as a long-term issue forced our parent company to make the difficult decision to make our paper a print edition only on Wednesdays.

It was a difficult adjustment and one we never thought we would have to make, but now we couldn’t be more thankful.

We have seen the hundreds of small, community papers close their doors this year, and we are so grateful to our readers, our advertisers and our parent company for sticking with us to make sure we are around for another century.

As we continued to adjust, big changes were made internally. Longtime managing editor Powell Cobb stepped away to pursue a degree in law, and general manager Mark Pope took a step back to enjoy more family time.

While it seemed scary for everyone to take on new roles, we couldn’t have been more proud of Powell and his dedication to further his education.

This decision forced everyone to work together until someone new could help out. During this time there were health scares and surgeries, but we are thankful they were only scares and it left us with the opportunity to learn new things about each position.

When new faces arrived, it left us thankful that we no longer had to do the job alone and that once again our office was full of people ready to produce an amazing product.

As we look back on the past few months, we really are incredibly thankful for everyone who has reached out with story tips, advertising inquiries and most importantly to introduce themselves and make our new faces feel welcome.

We give thanks for always encouraging us to do our best and we wish you a happy holiday season.