I didn’t really make a big deal of this, but if you look at the front page, go to the header for the newspaper, which we call The Flag in old school newspaper lingo.
Right below “Skye Canyon edition,” you’ll see some verbiage that reads “Volume 2, Number 1.” This means this is the first issue of the second year of publishing.
This means it’s the paper’s birthday. That’s a pretty good milestone in this era of newspaper publishing. It’s an even bigger accomplishment as this issue is 24 pages, the biggest yet. I started last October with a 16-page publication and printed only 1,000 copies. In March, I increased to 5,000 copies printed and direct mailed 4,400-plus to every address in Skye Canyon.
In June, I increased my page count to 20 and this issue went up to 24.
With extra pages comes the need for more articles and I’m happy to introduce Doug Puppel to my staff of writers.
Doug and I go way back to when I moved to Las Vegas in 1992 to work in the sports section of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Doug was an assistant city editor at the time. Besides being co-workers, we also spent a lot of time on the basketball court in the regular R-J pickup game.
We were among the taller folks in this game, so there was a lot of battles down low in the post. I’m not going to lie to you, but I pretty much schooled Doug in the paint.
Back at the office, Doug was promoted to Business Editor and I took over the community papers called View. At some point we each left the R-J and got too old to play hoops, so we didn’t talk much.
But when COVID hit and I was laid off my job, Doug was one of the first people to reach out. He offered to let me assist on some of the freelance work he was doing.
Now I’m in the position to return the favor. I connected Doug with the owners of SCS Life in Sun City Summerlin to create a column called “Neon Diary” for that community.
He’s doing the same thing for me at 215News-Skye Canyon. His first effort starts on Page 10.
Doug will always be looking for column suggestions centering around Skye Canyon, so shoot him an email if you have ideas.
— Kirk Kern