My wife's new job

I'm going to have to update the home page of my old website, that this blog is someday to replace.
It has the Fort Mill Times on it.
Anyway, Patricia is now editor of The Catholic News & Herald, the newspaper of the diocese of Charlotte.
She sent me an e-mail about a "daunting" aspect of her new job.
She had to edit a piece from 1750 words to 450. So you ask, "So?"
The writer is the Pope. 
I e-mailed her back, saying, "What's so daunting about editing the Bishop of Rome, the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, the Primate of Italy, the Archbishop and the Metropolitan of the Roman Province, the Sovereign of the State of Vatican City, the Servant of the Servants of God?"
Everybody needs an editor, my old senior editor Phil Hudgins used to write. 
I mean, the pope doesn't write his column while sitting on the Holy See, see?
(That would denote he is speaking, or writing, ex cathedra, or infallibly.)

Anyway, it was tough for her to leave her old gig behind.

Patricia's passion was the paper

It was with a lot of soul-searching that my wife, Patricia Larson Guilfoyle, decided to take another job.
She will probably add this letter to the things for which she wants to kill me, but she’s also, to a fault, someone who will keep things inside way too much, not wanting a fuss.
More than 11 years ago, she came to Fort Mill to take on the position of as publisher-editor of the Fort Mill Times. She thought it a good job, a step up from where she’d been. She thought the paper needed some help, and she had the skills to do what needed to be done. It was within her professional reach.
One of the things she thought the paper needed was a restored sense of presence in the community. To do that, she threw herself into several different activities and groups, including the Fort Mill Rotary Club, the chamber, the downtown association. She kept herself pretty busy.
She brought the paper around financially, and advanced it to where it was profitable, and also again one of the most awarded, respected large weeklies in the state of South Carolina. She ended up in more than one leadership role in those clubs, and also worked her way up to becoming the president of the S.C. Press Association. All at a very young age, I might add.
If one simply looks at her resume, she is one hell of a journalist and one hell of a businesswoman.
But her job in Fort Mill, from the earliest stages, became more than just a job.
She took on other assignments from her company because her company needed her skills. She did all those other jobs to the best of her abilities, and she did them well.
But it was always the Times and Fort Mill Township that had her heart.
Over the years she would introduce me to several people. Old guys, mostly. They all flirted with her; she tried her best to flirt back. Never anything serious in the conversation as I watched, but once they left, she’d tell me of the respect she held for those men. They are of that Greatest Generation and they are the men who built Fort Mill into something. Many are forgetting those men. But she never did, and always made a point to get them in the paper, to point them out to me.
It’s without a doubt, if she could have remained simply as the publisher of the Fort Mill Times, and been able to do her job the way she wanted it done, the difficult decision she made to leave would probably have been impossible. But her decision also has a lot to do with our family and her desire to find more time to spend with our son.
So, she made a hard choice. She worked about 60 hours her last week with the Times and parent company McClatchy, finishing up Jan. 29. She started her new job Feb. 1.
Because she won’t, I would like to let you know, on her behalf, how much she loved her time with the paper, how important all the readers were to her, and how much she loves Fort Mill. She’ll miss it, greatly.
Her new position is in North Carolina, but that doesn’t mean we’re leaving.
We’re staying right here, because she loves it, and she’s taught me to love it as well. This is a place that gets under your skin, in a good way.
On her behalf, I’d like to thank the readers of the Times for 11great years.
Stephen Guilfoyle

History does repeat itself

Years ago, when I first started working in Chester, and we got more aggressive about getting scoops and posting scoops on the web and taking a little journalistic pride in those scoops.
We got busy. By the time I was named editor, I had created my in-home "breaking news list."
And I got a request from someone to join that list. It was our competition. I liked that. What a hoot.
I might still have the e-mail somewhere. It's the little things like that in life that make you smile, most days. So it was probably a keeper. But we made a little house ad out of it, that we ran occasionally.
Said something like, "When your competition wants to be on your breaking news list, you know you're Chester County's No. 1 news source." Something like that. And it instructed readers on how to join the list.
They aren't really covering Chester County anymore. Not like they used to. Not like they ever really got much of anything first. My first editor at the paper before I took over actually did a little comparison sheet on when we got stories and when they got stories. That's back when they had a Chester County reporter assigned and about four others who would jump on certain stories out of their beats. So they had seven print opportunities to beat us to our two to beat them, and they had us out-resourced by about eight to four, if you counted their photographers.
But they couldn't come close.
Anyway, they are a shell of what they used to be. So I don't take the amount of glee in it I used to. But, as the title says, history does repeat itself.

I rarely use my twitter account. But what I do use it for is to post breaking news. It feeds from Twitter into Facebook, (which I call, "The Face"). So I can kill two birds with one stone and get the word out.