Thank you, Fairborn

Well, Fairborn, the time has come.

I have accepted employment outside of the communications industry and am leaving my post at the Fairborn Daily Herald. It’s tough saying goodbye, but at the same time I am looking forward to learning new skills and getting to know a new field. It’s been about five years since I first began covering the Fairborn community.

Thank you, readers, for your loyalty and support throughout the years. I can’t tell you how much that meant to me. Community is the heartbeat of local media.

Serving the readers has always been my end all, be all goal since landing my first reporter job and receiving my first story assignment eight years ago. Forget the click bait, forget the sensationally misleading headlines — everything I did was for the readers.

Everyone I worked with throughout the years wanted what’s best for Fairborn — whether a city official or a citizen. From my perspective Fairborn has heart.

There are more than 30,000 people who call the city home, but it always felt like a small town. Just like in the Darke County village where I grew up, where the population was about 2,000 people, I would run into someone I knew and worked with almost every time I paid Fairborn a visit. I hope Fairborn citizens take pride in that and keep it up. Thank you, Fairborn, for being so kind and welcoming to me.

I have covered the city’s economic development growth spurt, I reported how the schools were in need of new buildings and watched the votes roll in in support of higher property taxes so that new facilities would be constructed, I interviewed interesting people and told their stories, I wrote about crimes and tragedies – I even covered a Kroger wedding once. And now I’m closing out my time as a reporter in the midst of a global pandemic.

Fairborn, it’s been wild.

I am so grateful for the time I spent serving the community. I’m glad I met and got to know city officials and citizens. I will miss you.

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By Whitney Vickers