Looking Ahead: A Message To Our Community

A message to our readers from the publisher of McLean Communications

Ernesto Burden, Vice President/Publisher McLean Communications

Somewhere partway through last week, the already strange-feeling reality we were all living in here in New Hampshire took a hard, fast lurch to the surreal. If your business, your work, and your life, has been anything like mine since then, it may feel like three weeks have gone by in the space of three days. It may also feel like your primary daily activity has become reacting and reorienting your plan to the daily, sometimes hourly, changes wrought by our government’s work to clamp down on the transmission of the coronavirus.

But despite the psychic whiplash we may all be feeling, we’re also all getting on with it. We know you are, too. And there have been very good parts to the last few days: I’ve witnessed great acts of kindness and compassion in our communities. Bravery and resolution on the part of public servants, laborers in critical industries from health care, to food supply, to sanitation. And a genuine coming-together (metaphorically if not literally, given the need for social distancing) of families, friends, neighbors and communities to adapt and overcome.

I’ve also been proud to see our team at McLean Communications regroup, without missing a beat, as remote-working professionals, and fire up their webcams, laptops and VPNs to continue the business of providing news, entertainment, information and most of all, connection, to our readers and advertisers. Our entire team, from editors, writers, designers, marketers, advertising staff and operations folks, cares deeply about the publications we produce, including New Hampshire Business Review, New Hampshire Magazine, ParentingNH, New Hampshire Home and more. That devotion to the publications grows out of a love for the communities these publications serve, whose stories we tell, whose lives are so deeply entwined with our own. In the end, these aren’t just places we write about. They are home.

And while our communities are enduring this extreme trial, we want you to know we’ll continue to be here to tell their stories. Not just the urgent, critical stories of today, but the fun, diverting delightful stories of tomorrow as well, because even as we do the hard work of today, we absolutely have to keep our eyes on that hopefully-not-too-distant patch of green grass and blue sky. At the moment we have had to cancel some of the events we host, and postpone others. But we plan, by working remotely, to continue our regular publishing schedules, and even enhance some of what we offer online. For example, there aren’t many events for us to populate our calendars with right now, but instead we looked for ways we could promote our restaurants that are weathering the crisis by offering takeout and delivery instead of in-restaurant dining. We developed dynamic listings that could instantly be populated across all three of our larger sites. And we’re looking at other ways to support our state’s businesses as well.

Yesterday afternoon the temperature in Manchester crept up over 50F, and I took the opportunity to get out for a much-needed lunchtime run. As I passed through our neighborhoods, I was struck by how many people were using their social-distancing time to clean up their yards, raking, clearing brush, turning over the soil, generally preparing for a spring they know is coming. I share that optimism. We’re preparing too. There’s no calendar that can predict the exact date, but we’ll all weather this, together, and before too long, true spring will be here. Businesses reopening, parties thrown, friends gathering on all of the lawns I saw being prepped, spring. I can’t wait until we’re telling that story.

Sincerely,

Ernesto Burden
Vice President/Publisher
McLean Communications
A Subsidiary of Yankee Publishing, Inc.
An Employee Owned Company

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