For 5 Questions this week, the Herald speaks to Chad Parkinson, owner and publisher of Tidbits, the weekly paper that, according to its website, publishes “trivia, fun facts, amusing stories and oddities.”
Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to own Tidbits.
A: I've been doing it for 23 years. I originally worked at the paper called the Dakota Shopper back around the flood time, and the gentlemen that owned that one that ended up closing it. I had already come across a Tidbits paper in another area and was looking at possibly starting that up. Once he shut down his paper, I guess that was where I jumped in and decided this is what I should be doing.
Q: How are things going for the paper with the pandemic?
A: Well, it's not going right now. I basically had to shut it down. My means of distribution are shuttered because I go to a lot of restaurants and places like that. Some offices are open, but probably not enough to warrant publishing at the moment. Some businesses are shuttered, too, so then your ad revenue starts to shut down because they're not going to advertise when they can't be available.
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Q: Are you looking to restart publishing Tidbits?
A: I'm just kind of waiting for things to start leaning towards back to normal, and then, hopefully, get back out there. I’m optimistic that people are going to actually be happy to go to work and, hopefully, get the economy fired up again.
Q: What have you been doing in the meantime?
A: Probably what a lot of people are doing, taking care of some to-do list stuff, and clean my office and get things in order here so that I've got a nice clean slate to start with once again. Behind the scenes stuff that kind of gets put off. You try to educate yourself, like for me, try to learn some more stuff with software and things like that.
Q: Since you have this downtime are you looking at revamping anything with Tidbits?
A: No. I've pondered other ideas that I might have thought about, but the way I run it works pretty well. I'm marking down ideas and stuff in the downtime. You’ll see the tidbits that you know. It'll be an interesting topic every week, and, hopefully, I can just fall right back into place. I get people calling asking “Where's the tidbits?” Well, I'm here, I just can't do anything till I get a place to put it for you.
