Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Laura Leal was cooking at Leal’s restaurant late last year when the phone rang. With a staffing shortage, she didn’t hesitate to answer the call. It was from a competitor.
“Are you a manager at Leal’s?” the caller asked. “Are you happy at your job? Because if you’re not, our restaurant is hiring managers.”
The owner, cook and chief chili taster of one of Clovis’ more popular eateries laughs when she tells the story. But any business manager these days knows about the serious challenge of trying to hire or retain staff.
None of us is above recruiting associates from our competitors, especially with the city’s unemployment rate at less than 3%.
That’s how we came to hire a co-editor to work alongside Grant McGee at our newspaper. We lured Landry Sena away from her job at a Lubbock TV station. She’ll start at The Eastern New Mexico News next month, just in time to help oversee our transition into 2023.
Many of our readers know Sena as the former Landry Widner, a multi-sport star at Melrose High School and the daughter of longtime Melrose Superintendent Jamie Widner.
Landry graduated from Eastern New Mexico University with plans to change the world through storytelling, which she started doing about a year ago at Lubbock’s KLBK-TV.
Now she’s back home and ready to commit journalism on our team.
Sena is but one of the changes readers can expect from our newspaper in 2023. We expect she will bring a fresh perspective to the news as an active member of Generation Z. Look for more local news, told in creative ways, from one of our own.
She’s scheduled to start Feb. 6.
I’m confident Sena is one change our readers will appreciate as we work to improve our product through 2023.
Another change readers can expect is an increased emphasis on the size of the print product. The Sunday paper in particular will be noticeably larger with more features and more news, both local and regional. And, yes, maybe an often-requested return to some national news content that’s relevant to local lives.
Look for all of this to start as soon as next week.
Like every other newspaper in the country, we’re still trying to find our way in the post-pandemic and online world. What we know for sure is a quality newspaper is essential for the success of a vibrant community.
Thus the hiring of Sena to pair with McGee whose media credentials stretch for decades.
We expect 2023 to be full of changes – some things we’ll like, some things we won’t. For those of us who like a thriving hometown newspaper, this is going to be a banner year.
David Stevens is publisher for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:
