Musings – on the editor’s mind

Last week Cindy Vest won the 2019 WNPA Dixie Lee Bradley Award, an honor the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association gives annually that “recognizes newspaper staff members who work long and hard, often behind the scenes, to see that the best possible community newspaper is distributed each week … selection criteria includes a demonstrated record over a considerable time of consistent quality work in any facet of the community newspaper industry including production, circulation, or front office support.” Dixie Lee Bradley, for whom the award is named, devoted 45 years of service to the WNPA and its members.

Cindy is the staff person every newspaper wants to have as part of the team for 1,001 reasons, not the least being she has printer’s ink running through her veins: she is the daughter of a printer. She grew up in her dad’s shop in Everett. She never left the printing business. She “just” works for newspapers now.

As production manager for the La Conner Weekly News, she creates the paper every week. She starts at 9 a.m. Monday mornings. Everything that goes in each issue goes through her. All the ads, from classified through legals, are her work. She designs display ads, working with merchants, sales reps and the publisher. Stories, columns, editorials, letters and photos move from the week’s file folder into InDesign by her efforts.

Cindy takes rough layout sheets drawn up on scrap paper and does the puzzle master’s work of designing the week’s edition. By 5 p.m. Tuesday, most weeks, the paper is out the door, figuratively, sent to Skagit Publishing for printing.

Maintaining the mailing list database of subscribers, including sending out renewals, is part of her routine.

Wednesday mornings Cindy is at the office 6:30 a.m. for distributing the issue. She gets papers from the printer and sorts them for the retail route of stores and boxes. When that is done she takes legals for notarization.

But you know some, if not all of this because you come into the office or call with ads or subscriptions or obituaries or a lot of other things essential to a community newspaper.

Cindy no longer adheres mailing labels on each issue mailed, but for years she ran the Wing Mailer, filling the glue pot and stamping and cutting mailing labels from their roll, which she printed out on a dot matrix printer until 2018.

Cindy has been doing this for over 40 years. Early on she typeset for the Puget Sound Mail, back in the days of Compugraphics, hot wax and cutting and pasting copy. She also worked for competitor Channel Town Press. When that newspaper failed she shared in purchasing it, renamed the La Conner Weekly News, with Sandy Stokes.

I gladly took Cindy up on her offer to continue working for the paper when I bought the Weekly News in 2017.

Cindy is an essential institution and fact in the history of La Conner newspapers.

Cindy is a champ. She epitomizes what this award does: recognizes the behind the scene heroes that make issuing newspapers possible.