It’s good to be back at my writing desk after a twelve-month, well-appreciated hiatus. I was suffering writer’s fatigue after 20 exhilarating years of writing for Point of View. But now I am back with every intention of picking up where I left off.
But not without some changes. You might have noticed that the February issue of Point of View was a few pages shorter than our normal 40 pages…20 pages shorter to be precise.
There is a story behind the change that will be the topic of this, my first come-back article in which I will also write my analysis of the 2024 election challenges between Adam Gomez and Malo Brown and Bud Williams and Johnny McKnight. I had intended to write about the four political gladiators immediately after the 2024 election but I was concerned that anything I wrote might be perceived as being connected to some uncomfortable and clearly controversial truths I wrote in our December 2023 issue about the mayoral election between Justin Hurst and Domenic Sarno. There is no intended connection but conspiracy theorists might think so.
But, first things first. The POV editor, my wife Marjorie Hurst, and I had discussed retiring long ago but we really didn’t know what retirement meant so we kept working as we have always done and tried to gradually wind things down. But work always got in the way until we finally decided in 2022 to bite the bullet and rid ourselves entirely of one of our three businesses over each of the following three years. We dissolved the first one in 2023 and the second was effectively dissolved in 2024. And we had planned to dissolve the third one in March of 2025 but things didn’t work out as planned.
The third business is, of course, Point of View. We examined many possibilities for transferring it to another entity so that it could continue to be the people’s resource that it has become over the last 22 years but none worked out, which is why we had planned to dissolve it this month.
And it would have been the right thing for us to do at this time in our lives. I’m a month shy of 81 years old and in good health and I’ve worked all my life that I can remember. I’m due a stress-free rest since, like it or not, time is running out. I’ll let Marjorie reveal her own age but I assure you she has earned the same, not only for the work she has put in but also for tolerating me for the past 58 years of an eventful and fulfilling marriage and business partnership.
But we simply could not bring ourselves to terminate Point of View. So, we decided to make it more manageable and less of a workload and more of the fun that we always intended for it to be. Which is why, beginning last month, we reduced it to 20 pages. It was the only solution short of dissolution that made sense.
Point of View was a vision long before it became a reality. We pondered over the idea for years until we finally bit the bullet and published the first issue in March of 2003. Our plan was basic: to produce a quality newspaper with topical relevance to the community and make it consistently available to our readers.
We very deliberately titled it “An African-American Point of View,” not only because our target readers were primarily the African-American community but because it was also intended as a platform for all other communities to learn about and to cross-communicate with a community that had been too long without a quality platform of its own. Our vision, and the need for it, remains unchanged, which is why we chose to retain Point of View with fewer pages rather than close it down.

One of the byproducts of shortening the paper is that not all the articles that are submitted can be printed. We never could print all of them. There were simply too many and we had to select among them and we hoped our contributors would understand. With the reduction to 20 pages, we will have to be even more selective while the quality and consistency of Point of View remains the same if not better.
More articles submitted in each current month will be printed in subsequent issues (including my own article about the 2024 elections which was intended to begin as the second topic of this article). To the relief of our editor, it will instead be the subject of my April article, which will also include details about this year’s coming elections.
Our message to our readers, our contributors and our all-important advertisers is that we should all have some fun and look forward to the next 20 years of reading, writing and advertising in the most important African American newspaper in Western Massachusetts! ■