Welcome

By Aron Daniels

Welcome to our first PCWJ Digital Edition! Over the next four weeks, you will be seeing a lot of things form us that we are really proud to be able to share. Before quarantine, we had a pretty clear picture of how to push on with our magazine and bring more and more awareness to local women, non-profits, and partnering with great businesses, writers, and our photographer who consistently made us look like we knew what we were doing.

Turn the page and all of a sudden life for us involved two kids running around the house, running the business as a one-man-show as Amy had to refocus on schooling and childcare, and handling life the best we could while Amy was recovering from her surgery at the beginning of March when she donated her kidney to her friend with cystic kidney disease. Suddenly our finances were something we had to think about a lot more, and we were already pretty tight on finances. We had to handle all of it in an insane amount of isolation. To this day we have remained as careful as absolutely possible, and have not so much as given somebody outside of our house a hug. It’s been… a lot.

We are not alone. During this, we know that many other families have faced all the same issues. Everyone has had their lives flip upside down and then had to sit in that discomfort for four-plus months. It’s hard to be uncomfortable enduringly.

For a while, we had this optimism that things would regulate quickly and each issue of PCWJ that we missed, we truly thought would be the last one we’d have to skip before we could come back to printing. Today, we have put our new lenses on and are not viewing things pessimistically, but rather viewing things with a “what now” perspective. Now that the world looks how it does, what can we bring to the current world that is going to hold our original mission? Our answer is PCWJ Digital.

Over this month you will witness the first iteration of digital and see that even though life is looking profoundly different than it used to, there are people interspersed throughout our beautiful city who are doing amazing things, for other people, in business, in their homes, and that doesn’t stop just because the rest of the world changes.

In this time when politics are heightened in our minds, when everyone’s emotions are feeling amplified, and when it’s the easiest thing in the world to hyper-focus on our differences, we want to be a space that brings positivity, highlights important issues, and strives to reveal that people have more similarities than differences and that in the ways that we have differences from other people we have space to learn from them.

Please join us this month in this new expression of our mission, and share posts with people you know would enjoy them and root us on as we try to be our best and share the light we see in Pitt County.