Columns People

What are you supposed to say when you are expected to say goodbye to something you very much wish to hold onto? This is the very conundrum I am facing as I must say goodbye to this community as I embark on my next adventure.  For almost a year and a half, I have been blessed and honored to tell the stories of this community.  I have had opportunities to write joyful stories about businesses opening or about someone’s hobby turned life pursuit, but this career has also forced me to write the hard stories like those of murder or fire.  Like my university graduation cap, I never got to wear because of...

It took seventeen cents for me to begin to understand the often sad and frustrating reality of the approximately 150,000 Kentuckians living with dementia. When I arrived at Christian Community Care in Corbin on Feb. 24, I had a vague understanding of what I would be doing. I had been told I would experience a simulated version of what a dementia patient experiences daily by participating in a Virtual Dementia Tour®. The objectives of the tour were simple. Wearing gloves, goggles, shoe inserts and headphones, I needed to complete five simple tasks once I was inside the simulator room.  Once I had donned my ‘garb’, a facilitator guided me into the room...

McDonald's sells cheeseburgers, and newspapers sell news.  Recently, the News Journal has been experiencing a bit of an issue with social media users screenshotting content that has been posted behind our paywall and then sharing those photos in the comment section.  Let me explain why this is a really bad idea.  The first is it is illegal.  All of the content posted by the News Journal is copyrighted by the News Journal. When individuals reproduce the content, which is what a screenshot is, and then shares it in a comment of their own, they are essentially taking the content copyrighted by the newspaper and sharing it as if it was their own content...

I almost never became a journalist.  The first time I attended a Kentucky Intercollegiate Press Association (KIPA) Conference was the summer before my second year at Eastern Kentucky University in 2017.  I had just been hired on as the opinion’s editor at The Eastern Progress, which is the student media outlet at EKU.  KIPA is essentially a Kentucky Press Association Conference for college students. They don’t have a fancy awards banquet at the end, but they do have sessions where you can learn about different areas or topics of interest in journalism.  I remember being completely and utterly overwhelmed after my first KIPA session.  The first session I remember attending was a man who kept...

(Editor’s Note: This column was written before Christmas.) What happens when 20+ year holiday traditions are skipped for one year? Do they get reinstituted the following year? Are they forgotten? My family has had a few holiday traditions over the years that are set in stone. For example, on Christmas morning, my sister and I are not allowed in the living room until my mom or dad has turned on the video camera. Every Christmas gets videoed! It doesn’t matter if we open two gifts or 20 gifts, every Christmas morning gets videoed. As my sister and I have gotten older, some of our traditions have changed but even in our twenties, our videoed...

Have you ever been in the passenger seat of a car listening to music and watching out the window when all of a sudden you feel like you have experienced the exact same scenario before? Have you had that particular déjà vu experience? My most vivid memory of experiencing déjà vu while travelling happened three years ago. I knew for a fact that I hadn’t had the exact same experience before because I was on a different continent in a place I had never visited before. It was around this time three years ago; I was less than halfway through my study abroad semester at the University of St Andrews in...

What do woolly worms, the fogs in August and persimmons all have in common?  They are subjects of folklore tales used to predict the upcoming winter.  While folklore tales differ as they are told, they are all rooted in a similar truth.  Tales of woolly worms, also known as woolly bears, began in 1948 when Dr. Howard C. Curran, a curator of insects at the American Museum of Natural History decided to study the catepillars and found that many of his test subjects had wide orange bands, according to Farmers’ Almanac. The bands correlated to a milder-than-average winter.  Curran allegedly relayed his findings to a reporter, and his findings were published in the...

Every generation has their moment, or moments, when the world seems to stand still.  For my great grandparents, it was the attack on Pearl Harbor. For my grandparents, it was the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations. For my parents, it was the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and September 11, 2001. As a 23-year-old, I don’t remember first-hand what happened on 9/11. I know the stories I have heard. I can recite the facts that I learned in history class. For me, I don’t remember a world before 9/11, so when people say that the world changed after the terroristic attack, often they forget that there is now...