Celebrating significant women in Lycoming County comes very close to home in this week’s feature. Putting together a weekly newspaper that has a circulation of 58,000 such as Webb Weekly requires enormous skills in planning, organizing, and managing. Jim Webb Jr. found the perfect person for the job, years before he knew it. Her name was Steph Nordstrom.

Not long after graduating from South Williamsport High School in 1999, she signed up for a temp agency, and was assigned a three-day assignment to work for Webb Communications to fill in for another temp who’s child had the chicken pox. This lead to a long-term temp assignment at the printing plant. After spending a couple years working as a receptionist for Jim Webb Sr., Jim Webb Jr. walked in the office and noticed this incredibly industrious young woman and asked who she was. When Webb Weekly was in its infancy, Jimmy decided to utilize Steph to help keep him organized and together.

That was just the first step, and over the next few years Steph continued to show her skills and tenacious work ethic, which eventually resulted in becoming chief assistant to Jim Webb Jr. when he was Sales Manager for the Webb Weekly. In 2012, when Jim’s father passed away and he took over the reins of ownership, he was also soon confronted with the retirement of Mike Rafferty as editor. The editor has the task of working with a dozen different writers, as well as submitting an editor’s column, and laying these out along with hundreds of ads in a logical and aesthetically appealing scheme — week after week after week. Though there was a glass ceiling for female newspaper editors (outside of publications specifically geared toward females), Jim Webb knew he had the right person who could juggle all those plates at once — Steph Nordstrom.

The demands of journalism are relentless. Besides the normal operational duties, Steph’s on-going challenge is to continually find new eye-catching and engaging stories and covers. At the same time, even after careful planning, she has to be prepared for pleasant surprises such as Mike Mussina’s selection to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, which is a story that bumped everything else.

Even after several years in her position, Steph Nordstrom is still one of the youngest female newspaper editors in the country, and it does occasionally cause her problems. Some have difficulty taking her seriously, and the women’s perspective is not always appreciated. (She gets more than her fair share of hate mail). But it does not harden her. Steph finds that being a woman makes it easier to connect with people, and her softer side fits perfectly for a family newspaper.

And there are rewards as well. Steph’s greatest satisfaction was spearheading a series on the heroin epidemic in the Spring of 2014. This was a cause she felt so personally passionate about that she personally interviewed Williamsport’s mayor, police chief, the county DA, Judge Nancy Butts, and others for the series. It gained a lot of attention, and favorable feedback, and hopefully even saved some lives.

But the greatest thing about Steph’s job is the Webb Weekly office environment — the men and women she gets to engage with on a daily basis. They work hard and have high standards, but as a group they are able to laugh and joke with each other, and in general, make each other’s job a bit easier and more fun. Webb Weekly is not just a family newspaper — it is a family.