It’s Monday morning, the first of 2023 and the first Monday of my life as a newspaper owner.

I’m at the Cassville Democrat office with my wife and two girls. The 16-month-old just snaked the remote from her sister and turned off the Garfield show she was watching — nice touch.

The office is technically closed, but there’s no way we can get away with not putting in at least a halfday. I also couldn’t keep my weekend work-free.

Turns out designing an entire newspaper from the ground up for the first time takes a little extra effort.

While I have been getting my templates in order and spending extra, extra time making sure things are as close to perfect as possible, Jordan has been handling our obituary and legal submissions, building her routine going forward.

There’s a cavalcade of little things we have to do each week to make sure the paper gets where it needs to go. We’ve spent days now trying to figure out the best way to send shipping labels to our new printer, for example.

And it seems to never fail that when I am working on one thing, something else comes up that pulls me away for a minute, like just now stopping in the middle of writing this to fix ad copy in one of our business directory ads.

For my whole career, I have always had a corporate boss — a publisher, general manager or regional editor — above me. As Jordan and I take ownership of this paper, we are learning to be our own bosses.

Whereas most of my work will be in areas I have experience, namely content creation and design, Jordan is taking on a myriad of roles and responsibilities. I cannot express how proud I am of her for taking this leap with me and learning things like how to calculate the ad percentage in the paper, how to submit a postal report or how to use Quickbooks for business, just to name a few of her new duties.

For a while leading up to this transition, items were being added our “to do” list faster than we could check any old items off. Last week, we really turned a corner on getting Troutman Media fully operational, and that has led to plenty of excitement for this week, our first issue, and the plethora of projects we have planned for the months ahead.

Along with our normal news and sports coverage, we’ll have multiple special sections and pages highlighting our community. This week’s issue includes New Year’s greetings from local businesses, also marking my first time designing print ads.

Later this month, we will have our annual Unsung Heroes section, which we are expanding to highlight even more heroes than normal, like our school counselors, doctors and nurses. At the end of the month, we are debuting a winter sports tab highlighting not only the Cassville basketball and wrestling teams, but surrounding hoops squads that have very rarely had their team photos in print.

Next month, we are launching one of our new endeavors, Valentine’s Day wishes! We’re opening these up to you, our readers, to recognize someone special in your life within our pages. Keep an eye on our social media to see what you can do to make your special someone feel even more special.

By the end of February, a favorite special magazine will hit the shelves — Trout Times — and we plan to couple that annual issue with another new project, a staycation resort guide highlighting the many places you can weekend away from home… erm, at home.

March will also be a big month, as we will print our annual progress edition, focusing on the last year’s news in sectors like business, tourism and agriculture. We’ll end the month with another new special section (noticing a trend?) delving into the 2022 call figures for police, EMS and fire districts in the area and spotlighting some successes for our folks in uniform.

This is just the first quarter of the year for us, and there’s much, much more to come. One of the most exciting prospects about being owners now is that control over projects and how can use ink and paper as a mirror, reflecting as many of you as possible and as often as possible.

We believe the more of you we can get into print, the more you will enjoy picking up every edition.

As I have said before, we operate with an open door policy and would welcome any suggestions for coverage, special content or any other ideas you have that you think may benefit our readers.

We’re excited to get the year kicked off and these projects and more underway, and we are thankful and humbled by the support we have received already.

It’s now four hours after I started writing this column, and the little is taking her nap. There’s no better time to get things done.

Kyle Troutman has served as the editor of the Cassville Democrat since 2014. In 2017, he was named William E. James/Missouri Outstanding Young Journalist for daily newspapers, and in 2022, he won a Golden Dozen Award from ISWINE. He may be reached at 417-847-2610 or ktroutman@cherryroad.com.