Catherine Minolli has contributed to a little over 1,300 issues of the Tri-City Times. She has edited and written sad, inspirational and happy, mundane and hard hitting stories in all those issues.
Catherine will be retiring after 25 years of dedicated service to our communities and the Tri-City Times this week. This is her last issue.
The ownership, staff, local officials and our readers are going to miss her.
When a co-worker retires, it is indeed a special occasion. It is ironically a happy and a sad time. It only seemed fitting to have a retirement party to honor Catherine. This Thursday, September 19, 3 p.m. – 7 p.m., you are all invited to join us at the Tri-City Times office in Imlay City.
Catherine loves community newspapering, she is a real pro when it comes to reporting a news story and is widely recognized by her peers as an award winning feature writer. We estimated Catherine has over 10,000 bylines and more than 7,500 published photographs.
We could argue she has edited about 4,500 letters to the editor. That is a lot of names and faces.
Her walls are filled with awards from the Michigan Press Association’s newspaper contests from over the years.
She understood and accepted her role and responsibility to her readers and her newspaper as a community journalist. She did it and did it well in all situations.
It’s not always easy to be an editor of a small newspaper, where some issues may pit neighbor against neighbor. Couple this with the fact that sometimes the written word can be misconstrued, twisted and distorted from its intent, leaving Catherine with the difficult job of unraveling a complicated issue. Yet, she did it, each time, with grace and courage.
Community newspapering 25 years ago when Catherine started was completely different. She had a great vision of community newspapering and provided her readers with a voice, one they didn’t mind sharing.
She cultivated our communities to share ideas and concerns on our editorial pages. Catherine’s vision was to become a voice and foster an opposing voice.
I remember thinking, she’s going to take this town!
Catherine certainly did.
Catherine taught us a lot about herself and was not afraid to share her experiences in her columns. I’m certain she has written over 1,000 columns with a very good chance you may have been in one or two. She wrote about her strong and proud family traditions, one of my favorites was, “If the family kitchen table could talk.” A wonderful column about her family’s lore, recipes, conversations, laughs and tears shared over the kitchen table.
Yes, we certainly will miss Catherine, her work ethic and her love of storytelling.
Today, community newspapering is surprisingly much the same, but the way we deliver it has changed dramatically. Unfortunately the credibility it once had is a mere shadow of itself.
Looking forward we know our readers want information they can trust, they want it to be credible and fair. We will continue to publish strong community news, sports and features.
Maria Brown will step forward to be the 10th editor of the Tri-City Times since 1978. Maria has been with us for 16 years and shares the same respect for newspapering as Catherine. Some things will change as we look for new ways to lure more readers to our local news pages, whether they be offset newsprint or digital pages.
Over the next few months we will continue to provide you with the very best coverage we can. We’ll explore other ways to present you valuable local news and exciting new formats.
Maria will take us into a new world of community journalism, while we thank Catherine for her many wonderful accomplishments during her tenure.
We all wish only the very best in her future plans.
