On the move

Every time I move, I say it’s the last time. And somehow I always seem to prove myself wrong.

My most recent move isn’t a personal one, though. It’s just business.

After more than six years at our current location at 1105 S. Main in Berryville, the Carroll County News is moving to new space in Hickory Ridge Plaza.

It’s a much smaller space, but our staff is much smaller now than it has been, too. As people have moved on to new jobs or retirement, they haven’t been replaced. But we’re still printing a newspaper every week and my hope is that our customers — that’s all of you who are reading this column — don’t notice a difference in either our news product or our customer service.

The folks who are still with us are the backbone of our company — Mary Kay Abbott, Rick Harvey, Melody Strodtman and Rhonda Worrall, in alphabetical order. Without any one of them, we’d be in trouble.

We actually rented our new space in November, as my partners and I were negotiating the purchase of the newspaper. I knew we were going to be looking for smaller space and I didn’t want to take a chance that we’d reach the point where we were ready to move and not have somewhere to go.

We’ve spent the past couple of months sprucing up our new digs. John Bell, the son of co-owner David Bell, and Charity Donnell repainted the whole place and gave it a good scrubbing. John installed new lighting and new bathroom flooring. It looks like a whole new place.

We began moving in a couple of weeks ago, but this past weekend was the time to move mission-critical items — desks, phones, computers and our server. We owe big thanks to Ken Anderson and Greg Bartlett for ensuring that our phones and server work properly and that we are all connected and operational.

Big thanks, too, to Dave Umland and Mark Keeth for helping John with the heavy lifting on our move.

And I can’t fail to mention Jeff Worrall, Rhonda’s husband, who moved our postage machine and was kind enough to assemble my new office chair. (Regular readers will know I’m not an assembler.)

My partners, David Bell and Steve Johnson, spent several hours getting our “morgue” — that’s where we store old issues of the paper — ready to move to our new location. That was a big job, as was the actual task of moving the giant shelves.

We aren’t completely moved yet, and there’s still a lot of unpacking to do, but we are functional. It’s been a team effort and I appreciate everyone who’s been a part of it.

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Scott Loftis is editor and publisher of the Carroll County News. His email address is SLoftis@Carroll-CoNews.com.