A Note from the Editor: And Then There was One

For more than six years, Lowell’s First Look has been a “we,” but now it is just me.

When we started writing in 2016, we never intended to begin a business. For those who aren’t familiar with our origin story, we were brought together by a mutual acquaintance who was worried about the state of the city. The mayor was being recalled, and there was negativity in the air. This person thought more should be written about the good things that were happening in Lowell.

I’m not sure why or how that person chose us – Tina, Amanda and Maryalene – but it worked. We wrote some articles, people liked them and then Lowell’s First Look was born.

We were supposed to wrap up after the election in 2016. I can’t even remember who first made the suggestion that we keep going or how we evolved from a short-term side project to a full-blown business.

Everything about LFL has been organic. We’ve never had a business plan and never raised capital. Initially, we paid all the site costs out of pocket. There has never been a clear delineation of who does what either – we’ve just been flying along for years by the seats of our pants, so to speak.

The thing about having an “accidental” business is that sometimes you pause and wonder, is this where I’m supposed to be? And sometimes the answer is no.

We lost Tina in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic meant she needed to shift gears to focus on her other business – Optec – and she later moved out of the city. She is now happily homesteading in the country with pigs and chickens, and I would presume is quite happy to not be paying $5 for a dozen eggs at the supermarket.

During the past two years, Amanda and I have fallen into a routine in which I write and she takes care of all the tedious little business details that make me want to pull out my hair.

Then, at the end of last year, Amanda decided it was time for her to exit as well. In recent years, she has started taking on remote contract work and because she is so good at what she does, she has more work than time. Something had to go, and LFL was it.

So now it is just me.

I wish it were different. Part of what has made LFL so enjoyable for me personally has been working with Tina and Amanda. We didn’t really know each other when we started, but we clicked and many of my best memories from recent years involve these two ladies.

Running a business by myself – particularly a business that never sleeps – isn’t exactly my idea of fun. It has occurred to me that maybe this is when we say LFL has had a good run, pack up and dim the lights.

At the same time, it feels like we’ve created something important here. We hear time and time again from people who say they are so glad Lowell has LFL, how they trust us for their news, how they count on us to get the word out. Plus, it’s taken six years of hard work to get the site to where it is today, and it seems a shame to simply walk away from that.

So we’ll carry on with a few changes:

• No more weekend publication: Amanda has been good enough to schedule out the rest of the Oral History posts (you’ll see her name on the Restless Viking articles for the next month or so too), but once that Sunday series ends, the plan is to limit our publication schedule to M-F. I need Saturdays to prep for the following week and Sundays to unplug and decompress.
• Newsletter will move from Sunday to Friday: Since we operate LFL on a shoestring, we have a free email service that doesn’t allow us to schedule mailings – they must be sent manually. As part of my goal to avoid working on Sunday, I’ll hit send on the newsletter on Friday afternoon when I wrap up my workday then.

It makes me nervous to be responsible for LFL alone.  Part of why I think the site has worked so well is that we had three different people with different interests and different beliefs collaborating. Going it alone, my worries range from Will I ever be able to go on vacation without my laptop again? to Will there be ill-advised editorials published in the future? Even writing this, I am acutely aware that there is no one to read it over and tell me if I’m being authentic here or merely whining.

Plus, I wonder if I will miss activities, businesses and events that are not on my radar. I think of Amanda’s profiles of LoMi Studios and Milton Bushido-Ryu Karate as examples of businesses I didn’t even know existed until Amanda said she was writing about them.

I hope you’ll help me out in this regard and email [email protected] whenever you become aware of something you think LFL should cover. I might not be able to get to everything, but I’ll do my best.

The site also has a great group of contributing writers and guest columnists. If you are interested in joining their ranks, send me an email. The pay for writers is peanuts right now but maybe it won’t be someday. Guest columnists get backlinks and promotion on LFL in exchange for sharing their expertise with readers.

Amanda would probably be happier if I let her slip silently away without any recognition, but truly, LFL wouldn’t exist without her. While I like to think I have many ideas, implementation isn’t my strong suit. But Amanda is the type of person who gets things done. She designed the website, created the newsletter, installed the little widgets and whatnots the site needs to run and did so much more. She deserves so much credit for her work here, and I can’t let her walk away without publicly acknowledging that.

While Amanda and I remain friends, I will miss her dearly as a business partner. The door here will always remain open for her.

In the meantime, I look forward to continuing to develop LFL as your source for comprehensive and accurate local news. Onward and upward we shall go.