By Dean Midyette
Incoming Publisher
It is a tremendous honour to be taking over the publishers role for both The Pioneer and The Valley Echo. Thank you to past publishers Sheila Tutty, Marilyn Berry, Bob and Lisa Ede, Elinor Florence and Rose-Marie Fagerholm for providing the vision and leadership necessary to produce our beloved, high quality weeklies. I certainly have big shoes to fill.
Dean Midyette
While my family and I have lived in the Columbia Valley for almost 20 years, I was an off-and-on resident for the 15 years prior to that. One of my first jobs was bussing tables for Tim and Tony at Strands Restaurant over 30 years ago. In between local jobs and post-secondary studies, Ive resided in Calgary and Altario in Alberta, Toronto, Whistler and Mexico, but it was the beauty of this area and the people that made my family decide to make our home here.
Over the next few weeks you will see some staff changes, with the departures of Rose-Marie to Kamloops and Dan Walton to Penticton. What you wont see are any major changes to our newspapers. Last year our editor and production staff took six weeks to remake The Valley Echo. It now has an updated look and the reporting has never been better. I encourage all of you to pick up a copy and judge for yourselves. We are also regularly posting breaking news stories to our websites: visit them regularly to stay current.
No changes will be made to our editorial guidelines, and our newspapers will remain a mirror of our communities. We will continue with our professional, objective, balanced reporting with an eye on promoting respectful dialogue amongst community members. At times we will be accused of bias, but I know that when people from both sides of a contentious issue make that accusation, we are doing our best work.
