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20/20 Vision


This is the last Pub Notes of the year and the last Pub Notes to be published from the old building at 112 Foundry St., which has been Flagpole’s home for 20 years. We moved down here in the fall of 1993, and now, at the end of December, 2013, we’re moving to our new home at 220 Prince Ave. Twenty-year milestones are scary, especially when they’re combined with changing from the old year to the new and from old to new premises. We’re forced to reflect on so much time passed, so many friends here and gone. We’re also forced to look ahead. Yikes! What will the next 20 years bring? Will you be reading Pub Notes on your inner eyelid by then, beamed there by satellite from the roof of 220 Prince Ave.? Blink to turn the page?

Don’t laugh. 

When we moved down here, we were not far removed from composing Flagpole on two little Mac-Plus computers and enlarging photographs on a giant copy camera in the basement. (We moved it in my pickup, and it took six people to wrestle it into the building.) We were pasting up the paper by hand and driving the pages down to Greater Georgia Printers, in Crawford, GA. They’re still printing Flagpole, but now the paper is composed entirely by computer and transmitted to Greater Georgia by email. 

Will we still be printing Flagpole on paper in 20 years? Most people would guess not, but so far, even our readers who read us online still like to have the paper version to flip through, to read with their coffee, to hold and turn to the familiar sections, to get their fix, to keep it on the coffee table for reference. The fact that Flagpole is both weekly and free has proven advantageous. Our weekly paper is a package of insight and information that can be read at a leisurely pace or consulted for daily updates about what’s happening in Athens. Our online Flagpole keeps you instantly informed on important local news and also has all the information of the print edition available on your computer, tablet or phone. So you get the best of both platforms—a ubiquitous presence in Athens in hand and/or onscreen, and, since both are free, you don’t have to choose between them but just use either as the need arises.

Just as Flagpole is always changing, though it may take a 20-year milestone to see just how much, so Athens changes, too. When we moved down to Foundry Street, this was a deserted end of town. Armstrong and Dobbs was a thriving lumber company. The Farmer’s Exchange was Farmer’s Hardware; there was a feed mill instead of the multimodal center. The university hadn’t even moved its physical plant to the Chicopee complex, and there were no high-rise student apartments along East Broad Street, so the only traffic down here was folks heading back and forth home to East Athens across the river. Shopping was downtown, in Five Points, at Beechwood and on the Atlanta Highway; the Epps Bridge Road complex was a cow pasture, Caterpillar hadn’t thought of moving to Georgia to avoid unions and the Navy School was a fixture, even without an ocean.

We predict the future by extrapolating from the present and trying to adjust. People will continue to want information about what is going on. We’ll continue to provide that information. Businesses will continue to want to tell people about their goods and services. We will help them. How much all of this is in the paper and how much online or through other means is yet to be determined. We just know that we’ll be in the mix, scrambling to find the best methods to inform our readers and boost our advertisers. That’s what we’ve been doing for 20 years, and that’s what we anticipate doing for the next two decades and beyond. The new year will find us in our new offices, eager to continue serving Athens and happy to be here.

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