We’ve made some epic blunders. Epic. Blunders.
Somewhere in the beginning we extended credit to an out-of-town developer who left the Keys owing us nearly $20,000. This represented about a month of operating capital that we didn’t have. Those were the days when the Weekly staff hovered around five full-time employees working out of a one-window commercial space between a laundry and a kayak/bike rental business.
There are the 19 years of grammatical and typographical mistakes that come with producing approximately 144 pages of newsprint – every single week – across three editions. And the thousands of magazine pages published annually. We stopped counting those long ago.
The first major mistake was, of course, buying a 2-year-old newspaper — at the beginning of the recession. When we had no idea how to run a business — let alone a media company.
We didn’t know what we didn’t know.
Today, the Keys Weekly Media Group occupies three offices across Monroe County, employs over 20 full-time professionals and numerous freelancers, columnists and a network of distribution personnel who all play a crucial role in delivering the Keys vital and entertaining information about their community.
“Newspapers are dinosaurs,” they tell us. “Print is dead.”
Changes in the market have squeezed revenue sources and newspapers across the country find themselves at a precarious intersection. They can shrink staff, make cuts, whack distribution — maybe sell out to a hedge fund.
Or they can adapt and reinvest in their people. And this has been our philosophy for 19 years–through a recession, hurricanes, a global pandemic and beyond.
Our website has global reach and nearly half a million visitors surf our pages each month. Our “best of” events have raised hundreds of thousands for local nonprofits. And my business partner, staff and I have served on dozens of boards and belong to countless civic organizations and nonprofits — and we are the beneficiaries for doing so.
The last line of our mission statement reads, “Our success is measured through our employees and with them we passionately promote the arts, education, health, nonprofits and business communities throughout Monroe County.”
We are proud to be the only locally owned, community media company that covers the entire Florida Keys. This is a responsibility we take seriously — with some levity. And we are thankful and humbled to have experienced continual growth, even in an industry that is seemingly shrinking around the world. But our success is no secret. We invest in our people. We hire locals. We listen to our community. And above all, we don’t just cover our communities, we take pride in serving them as well.
We know none of this matters without you, our readers and supporters. So I thank you for 19 incredible years. There is nothing else, on this planet, I would rather do than provide news to this amazing stretch of islands we call home. A thank-you to our readers, sponsors and our staff will never be enough — but I promise we will always be “community first” publications.
