COLUMN: Celebrating one year of The Owen News

I’ve always loved Spring. Between flowers blooming, the weather warming up and morel mushrooms, there’s a lot to love about this time of year.

But now, April holds something else to love and celebrate – the anniversary of the print start of The Owen News. 

While the conversation sparking the idea for The Owen News happened three years ago, last April, we started providing a monthly printed product filled with local content. And it’s been a wild year. 

In early 2024, our board set the goal of releasing the first edition of The Owen News ahead of the solar eclipse. Afterall, the start of a new newspaper in today’s online world is relatively as rare as a total solar eclipse, and it was our hope that visitors to our community would know that we have a lot to be proud of. 

As a board, we didn’t know what to expect or whether or not we would be able to sustain printing a paper in the long-run. While we’re still working on total sustainability, we’re a lot closer than we were a year ago. 

At that time, all we had to go on was the faith and trust that our community would be there to support and value local news. And our community showed what can happen when we rally together around something to better our lives and the lives of our neighbors. 

We’ve hit a lot of milestones in our first year:

-In May, we held a ribbon cutting to celebrate with our community. 

-In August, we printed our first Fair Special Section. 

-In September, we won nonprofit of the year from the Owen County Chamber of Commerce. 

-In November, we launched our first NewsMatch campaign, leading to receiving the full match of $23,500.

-In January, we hired myself and our Advertising and Business Manager Lola Garrison. 

-In February, we won Regional Opportunities Initative’s Quality of Place Innovation Awards. 

-Last month, we brought back the beloved Morel Mushroom Contest.

And we’re only just beginning. We have a lot of hopes and plans for the remainder of 2025 and the start of 2026. A few of them include:

-Producing our first Graduation Special Section;

-Hopefully winning some awards at the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists banquet next month;

-Expanding to a twice-monthly printing schedule;

-Expanding our advertisement options and pick up locations;

-Growing our members;

-Developing a community information and resource app;

-Growing our volunteer base and training some volunteer correspondents;

-Having a successful NewsMatch 2025 campaign; and

-Publishing the first The Owen News Community Calendar. 

There is a lot to look forward to, and we know that the sky's the limit if our community works together. After all, the reason we’re here celebrating one year of printing Indiana’s first nonprofit newspaper is because of our community and the support we’ve received. We truly couldn’t do this without the support from the Owen County Chamber of Commerce, the Owen County Community Foundation, our advertisers and pick up locations, our board, staff and volunteers (including Kim Frazier who delivers papers for us and that I forgot in January’s column) and most of all, you, our readers.

If you have questions about or want to be part of one of our goals, please reach out to me at info@theowennews.org.