Familiar and different at same time

I’m back in Greybull at my hometown newspaper this week, and it’s all familiar and different at the same time. 

I started out my journalism career here. Nathan hired me as a photo stringer when I was a sophomore at Greybull High School, and yearbook advisor Mrs. Lynn Forcella had me designing pages, writing and taking pictures. My roots are here. My great grandmother Esther Lindsey used to be a typesetter for the Standard. My mom proofreads the paper every week, so if there’s any typos in this, that’s her fault. My younger cousins, Catcher and Grainger Rusell, have both written and taken pictures for this paper. 

It’s been a while since I’ve been settled here, though. I attended college at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York for photojournalism, worked a gig as a digital media team member at Acadia National Park in Maine, did a stint at Northern Wyoming News in Worland, then moved up to northwest Montana to be a staff photojournalist in Hungry Horse News’s log cabin office. Most recently I was editor of the Bigfork Eagle, a weekly newspaper covering the east side of Flathead Lake. 

I’m excited to be home – I’ve missed all the familiar faces and places – but I’m also readjusting to the slowness here. I think my hometown and newspapers are facing some of the same issues, in a way. There’s a lot of pressure to catch up, get with the times, we need new infrastructure and more digital access and to be on the move constantly. 

The fact that Greybull has hung on to its small-town nature, with new businesses popping up and longtime employees being honored just a couple of the articles featured in this week’s paper, is a good thing, to me. However, it still faces some of the problems I saw in the previous places I’ve worked, albeit on a smaller scale: housing availability, aging infrastructure and affordability to name a few. 

I hope this newspaper, in its 119th year, can still be a relevant place for community discussion and important local information that will guide how we handle these obstacles. I encourage everyone to be active here – write a letter to the editor, let us know what’s happening on your block. I would love to see some familiar faces featured on our pages!

Thanks for supporting the Standard, and please keep me in the loop as I get used to being back in G-Town. 

(Avery Howe is the Standard’s new staff reporter, but will also be contributing to the Basin Republican-Rustler as well as the Lovell Chronicle, our sister publications.)