Illinois Valley News

Bob Rodriguez (right) with the new owners Dan Mancuso (center) and Kevan Moore (left). (Photo by Scott Jorgensen, Illinois Valley News)

We may not write some-thing every week in this “corner” like our predecessor did, but we’d be remiss to not say something this first week in our first issue.

So, first things first: thank you.

Thank you for the wonderful welcome to this wonderful corner of the world.

Quite frankly, we’ve been blown away by the friendly, fascinating and fortuitous encounters we’ve had with so many people in so little time.

The first of those people on our list, of course, is Bob Rodriguez who, along with his wife, Jan, dedicated al-most three decades to this newspaper. With any luck, we will continue to benefit from Bob’s sage advice and the legacy he left us.

There’s just no doubt that we’re going to need some help from Bob, and you, from time to time — just like we did from so many other folks at so many other steps along the way in this business that we love.

Between the two of us, we’ve overseen newspapers and newsrooms; covered news beats and advertising accounts; run presses and served as flyboys at the end of the line; witnessed triumphs and tragedies; taken classifieds and taken com-plaints; shot sports and been at the scene of shootings; delivered papers and accepted cancellations; spiked stories on deadline and stopped the presses afterwards.

But, the bottom line is, we’ve never done any of those things in the Illinois Valley. In each of those in-stances mentioned above, though, there was always a mentor, a reader, a col-league, a friend, a trusted source or someone else to help guide us and get us through.

Community newspapering is in our bones. That may sound hollow at first, but trust us when we say that we know that you, our readers, are the marrow that will hold this whole thing together.

We’re asking for your trust, but first, as we said in the beginning, would like to offer our thanks for the warm welcome.

-Dan Mancuso, Publisher
-Kevan Moore, Editor

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