This week commemorates the 20th anniversary of this weekly newspaper, Webb Weekly. Hardly a week goes by that I do not hear from someone about their appreciation for this very unique publication. Unlike a normal newspaper that follows a journalistic model, this weekly publication is rather different.
Probably the most significant thing about it is that it is free! There are very, very few things anymore that are free, but every week the Webb Weekly goes out to tens of thousands of homes in Lycoming and surrounding counties at no cost to the recipients. The reason this can happen is that the paper is funded by advertisements. It is certainly not unusual for a newspaper to have paid advertisements (they all do!), but at Webb Weekly, those who advertise are ensured that their product or service will go out to everyone in the county. And it will get read, too! We know from hits on the website as well as word-of-mouth from our patrons and the community at large that our constituents enjoy reading about sports activities, home activities, entertainment, etc., as well as discovering the shopping bargains throughout the area.
How I became a writer for the paper is quite a story in itself. It was in April of 2014, and I was invited by then-Mayor Gabe Campana to visit St. Boniface Elementary School for a presentation on drug awareness. At the time, I was quite involved with the Heroin Task Force of Lycoming County, and the mayor wondered if this program might be one that could be modeled elsewhere.
Unfortunately, I found all the doors to the building locked and was unable to reach the mayor on my phone. I was standing out on the corner of Penn Street and Washington Boulevard, trying to figure out what I should do, when I saw a man standing nearby who seemed to have the same problem I was having. I went up to him and asked if he was also trying to get into the building as well, and said he was.
Since we were sharing the same misery, I decided to introduce myself, and he did the same; it was Jim Webb Jr. I asked if he was related to the Jim Webb, who was the publisher of Webb Weekly, and he told me that the original publisher was his father and that since his dad passed away, he was now the publisher.
Simply for conversation’s sake, I noted to him that I believed what was missing from his paper was more ‘people’ features rather than just sports and entertainment. Suddenly, my name rang a bell with Jim. His wife, Michelle, worked at then Sovereign Bank and had been a lifesaver to my wife and me. We returned to the USA after sixteen years abroad and discovered we had no credit rating. It was a terrible conundrum that Michelle worked out for us, and after so many visits, she learned that I was a writer. She asked to read my novels and apparently enjoyed them as she began to nudge her husband to get this guy writing for Webb Weekly.
Providence appeared to intervene because, after just a few minutes of discussion, Jim invited me to do a column for the paper along the lines of what I was telling him was missing. We decided to call it “Leaders in Our Neighborhood.” It was some months later that we discovered that the acronym for this was LION, which is a header that we still use.
Then at the Christmas Party in 2015, he suggested that I start writing another column. I asked what he had in mind, and he suggested covering county government. I thought that would be as stale as week-old bread, but I agreed to give it a try. Again, God’s hand was at work because this turned out to almost be a calling for me.
And it all goes back to Jim Webb Jr. He has some of the most uncanny instincts of anyone I have ever known. Who else could have taken a female temp secretary, Steph Nordstrom, and mentor her to become one of the youngest female newspaper editor in the country? How could a guy who barely knows how to turn on a computer discover how to expand a newspaper into a multimedia source for area sports? Who else but Jim Webb Jr.?
Beyond this, Jim has also been an excellent example for us all in demonstrating how to keep our career and family in balance. He has been an amazing CEO and, at the same time, an incredible husband and father. Hats off to you, Jim. You are truly a LION.
