As promised, we are back up and running with our print and digital publications of two issues per week.

We have stressed to all that the COVID-19 disruption of business hit us extremely hard. For instance, you will notice in this newspaper that there are zero pre-printed inserts. Many of our consistent and long-time advertisers went away.

Two years ago, our norm was five to six pre-prints every week. That particular income stream may never come back to us.

I've been working here for 38 years. Without getting too deeply into the nooks and crannies of our profitability business model: In the pre-COVID-19 days, we needed to have enough advertising support to print at least 32 pages of newspapers per week, with five pre-prints included weekly to reach the break-even point of profitability.

In 2020, due to the catastrophic disruption caused by COVID-19, we only had enough advertising support to print an average of 24 pages of newspapers per week, with an average of one pre-print insert per week. As a result this business bled cash at an alarming rate.

All business schools teach us that free enterprise businesses cannot suffer continual losses and stay in business.

Our long-standing business model was shattered. After a full year of this, we were forced to hit the “re-do” button, or go out of business.

Here’s something else we don’t talk about much: We have not had a subscription price increase in over eight years. During that time we have absorbed several postal rate increases. Our $35 yearly subscription price is approximately 25% of our real cost of printing and distributing newspapers twice a week to our subscribers. We also have the extra expense of hand-delivering all in-county papers to Kingfisher County post offices every Tuesday and Friday night to ensure Wednesday and Saturday morning delivery to all in-county subscribers. Our costs have risen, and we haven't passed those costs along to our subscribers.

We offer zippy delivery and keep that price low to encourage all local subscribers to continue to be loyal subscribers. Our philosophy is to lose money on subscriptions so that we can make up that difference by selling advertisements with a very healthy in-county subscriber number.

Our outlook is not gloom and doom. We are optimistic. We have some very good and loyal advertising customers here. And we are not lazy. We work for our income. We must now work smarter.

We continue to have our long-time friend and Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Famer Barb Walters covering news “north of the river” and we are also pleased to announce that Laura Sadler of Okarche has joined us as news correspondent for that community. We are delighted that we can now provide even more news to go along with Michael Swisher’s sports coverage there.

We have hundreds of faithful Okarche subscribers, and we look forward to providing even more up-to-date sports and community news for our friends and neighbors to the south.

Gary Reid, 85 years young and still going strong, is here mostly six days a week. He’s also in the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame. He recently had a hip replaced (twice). As soon as the second rehab is complete, he plans to be much more mobile. He has no plans to slow down.

Let's be honest: We have 10 full-time and part-time employees here, and at least eight of us work five to six days a week through our laptops and cell phones both at home and the office. Our "through the front door" traffic is much less than it was 1 0 years ago and our business phones ring less and less here. It's actually been that way for quite a while.

However, our personal cell phones ring a bunch and most of our interaction with customers and subscribers now happens through our cell phone conversations, text messaging and e-mails.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses, large and small, discovered ways to cut down on overhead by having their employees work from home over the past 18 months. In many cases, they had to, or they went the way of the blacksmith industry and buggy-whip manufacturers.

In our effort to reduce costs, we closed our office on Wednesdays. We will continue to do that through December 31.

Because Kingfisher County is rich in minerals, many of us here have had a good run for two to three years, pre-COVID-19.

We are delighted that many of our friends and neighbors were able to realize wealth increases during that 2016-19 boom cycle. We here at the newspaper also saw a significant income boost through increased legal publications as a result of the oil and gas activity here.

Unfortunately all our profit reserves bled away in 2020 as I was overly optimistic and attempted to keep everything the same in the hope that the COVID-19 mess would not become the full-blown disaster it turned out to be.

However, one by-product of the Biden presidency may very well be $100 per barrel crude oil, as a result of his administration’s economic policies. So, although not good at all for the average U.S. citizen, that may work out well for future oil and gas drilling in our county.

There is no guarantee that our federal government will not hammer us again with more shutdown measures as the new variants of the virus are unleashed among us. If we get a repeat of 2020, it will not only bring more hard times to this newspaper, but for most of us in America.

Even with these unknowns, we remain optimistic that we will push forward with our intent to return to our traditional norm.

–Barry Reid, Publisher