Georgetown is turning out to be a fun experience. It did not start that way. LMI consolidated their Pikeville, KY, production into the Georgetown plant in April 2023. The fish swallowed the whale. Workload tripled in Georgetown, OT was outpacing straight time labor dollars, print quality was suffering and I saw an opportunity to help them dig out. We did that by bringing the press line back to spec, installing updated platesetters, reorganizing the post press department, rebuilding processes throughout the plant, establishing a functional chain-of-command and much, much more. We're finally over the hump and things are settling down. Every time I do this, it gets easier. I have a knack for employee retention so I was able to staff key positions with dedicated folks with whom I've worked for years, including at least one key employee from each of my previous postings. That sure helps. We were on the verge of becoming newspaper nomads until Mike Scogin gave us a home. Thanks, Mike!In six short months, we took production from an unsustainable (and unprofitable) downward spiral to a sure-footed and agile beast currently in search of new and challenging accounts to add to our stable of happy print customers. I am beaming with pride at this success story.

I was excited to accept the challenge of managing BNI's Winchester print production pub. I saw this as an opportunity to marry my new skills in plant consolidation with my old passion of high quality commercial print production. The only real makeover I had to do was convert the existing preprint warehousing process into a dynamic warehousing system to conserve space. The bonus was that we had real-time online tracking for our preprint customers. I was blessed to have inherited an extremely good press crew and a fairly well maintained Web Leader press. Things were running well until Gannett ate my lunch, Kentucky lost another printing plant and skilled workers with 30+ years of experience were laid off. Everyone asks me why good pressmen are so hard to come by these days. Easy. They've all been burned one too many times.

I worked toward the consolidation of three former LCN printing facilities into one regional hub for Paxton Media Group. I gained experience in SLS2000 inserters, high throughput production, distributed production, NX Cloud prepress and high turnover environments.I accepted this job because I realized that my Cynthiana customers would be transferred to the consolidated facility in Shepherdsville when we closed the doors on the old plant. Having decades long relationships with most of them, I wanted a smooth transition. With a daily round-trip commute of 234 miles, this was, without a doubt, the most grueling phase of my career. Every day was a 16 hour day and many were over 18. I had to plan on a scale that I had not seen before and sell those plans to some very skeptical employees. To hit the demands of the new workload, I needed to triple throughput. That's a lot of tech and a lot of process design and improvement. Seven months in, we hit the goal and entered into stable production with the least stable workforce I've ever managed. Having done what I set out to do, I saw an opportunity to hand it off and move on. My family was grateful.Along with the challenges came some first-rate learning opportunities. I had done large logistics jobs before but not with this volume. I had made-over departments before but not on this scale. I had managed crises before, but not with this frequency. I doubt I will ever see that kind of operational tempo again. As far as rapid integration of new processes and tech, this opportunity was as exciting as it was draining. I'd do it all again if my customers had skin in the game.

Growing business, cutting costs, exceeding expectations and managing, in a general kind of way. Cynthiana Publishing was a small web shop in north central Kentucky, running 1 DGM 430, 2 whack-and-stack towers, and more mono-units than any line should have into a Goss SSC folder. In her day, she printed pubs from Ohio to Tennessee. Cynthiana weathered the real estate downturn of 2008 after years of turning out countless copies of Kentucky Homes and Tri-State homes magazines. Her dedicated staff never forgot their core product: weekly community newspapers. Through downsizing and pay freezes, Cynthiana rarely missed a deadline, never hesitated to pick up slack from our sister plants and consistently turned out quality work. I'm proud of the part I played in maintaining that legacy. And though it ended in an inevitable consolidation -- due to poor geography more than anything else -- I'm fairly certain that I worked with the finest crew ever. Cynthiana and her people made me who I am and I lost a part of my heart when I had to close her.Fun story about my time in Cynthiana here: https://www.nkytribune.com/2019/10/start-the-presses-the-nkytribunes-first-print-edition-is-being-delivered-to-your-mailboxes-today/?fbclid=IwAR0BEIZa9s_wgzwIkpv49fv_7IlAUg1TvIn2SZCX9bNQWMbuK8eARW30QP0Another fun project here:https://members.kypress.com/articles/governor-salutes-cynthiana-democrat-mayor-judge-executive-pitch-in-at-press-time/

Deployed and maintained a wide variety of technology related to the printing industry, from Screen and Kodak platesetters and processors to automated press registration systems to inkjet addressing systems and everything in-between. Deployed and maintained Windows Server 2003 & 2008-based RIPs and workflows. Assisted with Mac and PC issues. Designed task-specific workflows for all phases of the business. Worked with printing customers in Quark, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and Multi-Ad Creator to hit pre-press specs and produce optimal output. Troubleshot issues from head to tail and found rational and cost effective solutions.I interpreted the "technology" aspect of my responsibilities fairly broadly. Of course there was traditional IT, but I had fingers in editorial, advertising, circulation, camera department, press, post press, and even distribution. Along the way, I became a "jack of all trades" since technology touched everything we did. From website to inkjet to postal sortation to route planning -- it's all technology.During this time, I spent a shocking amount of time on circulation and postal sortation. That rabbit hole started with migration from Interlink's Circulation Manager to CM2. I thought I was signing up for simple data transfer but ended up running circulation for Cynthiana Democrat for several years. I worked closely with Max Heath to troubleshoot sortation issues and I developed a network of contacts at the USPS to help ensure smooth local, regional, and national delivery of periodicals and standard mail. My largest circulation project was a 160,000 piece TMC piece delivered into Northern Kentucky. I worked directly with Interlink's Brad Hill to make that happen flawlessly.

Publisher and mentor, George Jacobs, gave me a one-sentence mandate: Improve our business. I did that through the rational application of technology and a fair amount of leg work. I worked with new and existing print customers to move away from pasted layouts and to electronic pagination. In that role, I traveled near and far and often hung out with commercial customers for extended residencies. And, yes, I even snagged a few new commercial accounts. At the height of this position, I was serving similar roles for Cynthiana, as well as our plant in Tell City, IN. The result from moving customers to e-Pagination was an explosion in profitable commercial color and faster turnaround through our newly installed CTP system. My opening statement to hesitant customers was "I've never had one customer who transitioned to electronic pagination ask if they could go back to the wax machine." It was the truth.Did I mention that I was still running four monthly real estate magazines while I did the other stuff? Busy time, indeed.This role ended with the installation of the new CTP line in Cynthiana. I knew from the outset that shooting flats to film would not be an option by 2008Q1. No papers were left behind. Business: improved.https://www.worldofprint.com/2008/03/12/cynthiana-publishing-company-drives-production-with-newsxtreme/

I started a job composing advertising for a real estate specialty publication. Within a year, I was managing the publication of Kentucky Homes / Tri-State Homes, covering Southern Ohio, Southern Indiana, and most of Kentucky east of Louisville. At the height of KHM, I was over the main office in Cynthiana and the satellite office in Berea, KY, with duties running the gamut from production to sales to AP/AR to distribution. I had my fingers in KHM until the great recession of 2008 when the bottom fell out of print real estate advertising. I was then charged with closing down the enterprise, clearing off bad debt, and the other assorted nastiness that comes from ending an era.Ironically, KHM is how I ended up working with prepress and press to develop quality offset printing. At the time, color repro was everything to real estate advertisers (and they looked for any excuse not to pay). Starting with PhotoShop, then working through Quark and InDesign, I eventually ended up in the camera department outputting films and making plates. That, in turn, drew me into the press department to set ink with pressmen. While I understood the process from undergrad (extreme shout-out to Prof. Ed Nass), KHM provided an opportunity for practical experience and I took full advantage of it.Without Kentucky Homes, none of the other stuff would have happened.

Worked in news and sports photography for a small weekly paper in Central Kentucky through high school. I had the honor and pleasure of working with Warren Fisher and Hank Bond at the Mercury. The smells of melting wax and darkroom chemicals still have the power to transport me back to 1986. Thus began my love affair with community news (and seeing my name in print).