I HAVE BEEN A NEWSPAPER EDITOR for thirty-one years. I have edited papers in Rice Lake, in La Crosse, in Duluth — which is technically Minnesota but spiritually Wisconsin — in Appleton, and in a place called Millhaven whose status as a functioning municipality is no longer certain and whose school board I will never write about again, for reasons I am not at liberty to discuss but that involve a parking lot, a resolution that should not have been passed, and a superintendent whose name I can still recite from memory at two in the morning when I cannot sleep.

What I have never done, in thirty-one years, is open a newspaper. This is the first time. I want to be clear about that, because it feels significant and I am not a man who uses the word “significant” lightly. Most things, I have found, are not significant. They are events. They happen. They get covered. They are filed. The significant ones are different: they are the ones you remember not just what happened but how it felt when it happened. I remember how it felt to stand in the Tribune’s offices on Tuesday afternoon, looking at empty desks that will be occupied starting Monday by people who are going to cover this town for as long as I ask them to, and thinking: this is an act of faith. Not in the religious sense. In the human sense. Which is the more demanding one.

Today, that faith is rewarded. It is rewarded, specifically, with a ribbon-cutting that three hundred people attended in the September sunshine and which was, by every measure I know how to apply, a good day. A genuinely good day. The kind that gets recorded in the memory as a before-and-after.

I have some concerns.

My first concern is the Mill Street sidewalk gap, which I have mentioned in the main section of this newspaper and will mention again here because I believe it bears repeating. The gap is thirty feet. It is between the factory entrance and the nearest bus stop. When 150 people begin arriving at the factory next Monday morning, some of them will be arriving by bus, and the ones arriving by bus will encounter, on their first morning of work, a thirty-foot gap in the sidewalk and a choice between walking in the grass or walking in the street. This is not the welcome a worker deserves. This is not the impression a town should make on its first week. I will be writing about this sidewalk until it is fixed, and I will be measuring my progress in column inches. Today’s allotment is three. I have twenty-seven to go.

My second concern is Alderman Dale Przybylski of the 1st Ward. I want to establish very clearly at the outset of my relationship with Alderman Przybylski — which begins in this column and will continue for as long as he is a public figure in this town — that I have no evidence of wrongdoing. I am a newspaper editor. I require evidence. I deal in evidence. The absence of evidence is not evidence, and I am aware of that.

What I have is the following: a feeling, developed over thirty-one years of covering local politics, that Alderman Przybylski is a man who is trying to accomplish something he is not yet ready to disclose. This is based on the following observations, each of which I will now enumerate:

One: Alderman Przybylski has tabled the same motion — regarding a traffic light at the corner of Commerce and Mill Streets — six times in six weeks. A man who wants to table a motion tables it once and waits for the right moment to reintroduce it. A man who tables it six times either doesn’t want the motion to pass or wants something in exchange for letting it pass. I have no evidence for either conclusion. I am noting the pattern. The pattern is six tables.

Two: Alderman Przybylski attended the opening of Kowalczyk’s Furniture Barn, which advertises in this newspaper, and was photographed shaking hands with Alderman Kowalczyk, who is the furniture barn’s operator and who is not, to my knowledge, related to Przybylski but who is the sort of man that Przybylski would be photographed with. The furniture barn is a legal business. The handshake is a normal act. I am noting it for the record.

Three: Alderman Przybylski has two sofas in his council office. He says one is from his wife and one was left by a previous tenant. This may be true. I have not verified it. I will.

These are the concerns I have about Alderman Przybylski. They are not accusations. They are notes. The notes will accumulate. In time, the accumulation will either resolve into a pattern that means something or disperse into the general background noise of local politics. Either outcome is fine. My job is to keep the notes.

My third concern is somewhat more personal, and I mention it only because a column is supposed to have a human element and this is my one concession to the genre: I am worried about whether I am the right person to do this job. Not because I lack the skills — I have thirty-one years of skills — but because opening a newspaper is different from running one. Running one, you are maintaining something that already exists. Opening one, you are deciding what it should be. That is a heavier responsibility, and I am aware of it, and I am aware that the weight of it does not diminish with awareness.

The answer to that concern, I have decided, is simply to do the work. Write the things that need to be written. Cover the things that need to be covered. Let the paper become what it is by doing what papers do: showing up, every week, with the news, however many column inches it takes.

This town is good. I am going to say that again. This town is good. I have been in bad towns and I know the feel of them, and this is not that. This is a town that is trying to be what it says it wants to be, which is the hardest thing a town can do and the most worth doing.

I have some concerns. I will write about them. That is the whole job.

Fourteen column inches. Unprecedented. I will not be repeating this.

— Rod Black
Editor, The Internet Tribune
September 11, 2026

Rod Black’s Black Rod Blog appears in this space every Thursday. Letters to the editor may be sent to [email protected]. Letters will be printed at Rod Black’s discretion. Letters about Rod Black will be printed at Rod Black’s discretion but read very carefully before that decision is made.