A NEW LOO for your friendly neig By RANDY CAPPS
I
’ve been in media for the better part of 30 years, and in that time I’ve learned a few things about my readers. One such thing is that nobody outside of a newsroom likes a redesign. To be honest, there are plenty of folks inside those walls who feel the same way. There are plenty of reasons why, but the most simple one is an aversion to change. People get used to things looking and feeling a certain way. There’s a comfort in picking up your friendly neighborhood magazine and knowing how the fonts will look. You’re never surprised when you turn the pages, because it always looks basically the same. My favorite uncle had a saying that’s always stuck with me: “Anything that isn’t growing is dying.” I think there’s truth in that, and despite the fact that 2020 was a challenging year for us in far too many ways to list here, we have an eye on the future here at Johnston Now. We’re going to be offering digital marketing solutions, we’re looking to expand our content, and, as you might have noticed by now, we’ve updated the pages of the magazine with a fresh, new look. It’s a bit of a departure from what we’ve been doing, but it seemed to us the perfect way to celebrate our fifth year covering all of Johnston County. This is the 50th magazine that Shanna and I have done. Just for fun, we thought we’d take a look back at our journey from our early days as the Four Oaks Journal to where we are now. If you want to go back and read any of these past editions, visit www.johnstonnow.com/ archives. 16 | [ JOHNSTON NOW ]
MAY 2015
In our first issue, we told the story of the Weaver family and how egg donation provided them with a pair of blessings in the form of Amrynn and Mason.
JULY 2015
Speaking of firsts, this issue turned out to the pilot version of what we now call our summer guide.
JUNE 2015
We put together our first graduation edition, and we learned a lot from the process that we’ve carried over to the future editions.
AUGUST 2015
There was a ton of Four Oaks-area school news that summer, so we decided to make a theme out of it.
