A Letter from the Founder: Why This. Why Now.

There’s a good chance you’re reading this at a kitchen table. I hope so. The coffee gone a little cold, the house quiet for one rare minute, this paper in your hands instead of a screen lighting up your face. That’s the picture I kept in my mind the whole time we were building this. So pull up a chair, and let me tell you how we got here.

My family has been in Southeast Indiana for a very long time. The Platts put down roots in Dearborn County in the early 1800s, and somewhere along the way the roots just took, generation after generation, none of us ever finding a desire to leave. Today I live in Greendale, close enough to walk to my parents, my brother, my grandmother, my closest friends. I am raising my own family on the same ground my great-great-grandparents once worked. When I tell you this place is home, I don’t mean it lightly. And as it happens, this first issue is a celebration of exactly that — two hundred and fifty years of a country, and the small, stubborn, beautiful corner of it we get to call our home.

A few years back, I became a co-owner of another local publication. I’m grateful for every bit of it; it taught me more than I knew I was learning at the time. But it wasn’t the right fit, and I stepped away. What I couldn’t leave behind was a quiet conviction that had been growing in me the entire time… that this community deserves to be truly seen, and that the thing I cared about most, real human connection, was slipping further out of reach with every passing year.

I spend my days in marketing, in consulting, in data, and more and more in artificial intelligence. I know how the modern machine of information is built, because I help build it. And it has worn me thin. I am tired of the clickbait. Tired of the outrage dressed up as news, the breaking-this and breaking-that, the endless chase of the next alarming headline. Tired of a world so loud with content that you can scroll for an hour, learn a hundred things, and somehow walk away feeling emptier than when you started.

Sometimes you must make peace with being only human. I would rather have three good books handed to me by someone who actually read them, and loved them, and stayed up too late finishing one, than thirty titles spit out by an algorithm that has never felt a thing. The thirty just bury me. I read none of them. And they are always missing the one ingredient that can’t be faked: a real person, with a real life, telling me why it mattered to them. That kind of care, that human fingerprint, is still out there in the world. It’s just gotten so hard to find beneath all the noise.

So I decided, simply, to make the thing I was hungry for. The thing I wanted for myself, and for the people sitting around my own table. When you spend most of your waking hours tethered to a screen just to earn a living, you start aching for a way to unplug without unplugging from each other. The SEI Times is my answer to that ache. And I figured if I was craving it this badly, I probably wasn’t the only one.

I’m not in this alone, and I wouldn’t want to be. My co-founder, Justin, is one of the sharpest leaders I know and a partner of mine across 39 North Marketing and Waypoint Consulting, both rooted right here in Southeast. He believes in this with the same stubborn faith I do, that a place is worth tending, that a community is worth the work, that something built with care can still cut through a world built for speed. It means everything to make this with him, Emily, and the rest of the team I have supporting my wildest dreams.

Here is what we believe a community publication can be. Not breaking news, we will gladly leave that to the others. Instead: curation. The patient work of listening to what Southeast Indiana actually wants, and then building it, piece by piece. What really happened at the council meeting down the road from you. Profiles of the people and places and ideas worth passing along, the kind you turn over in your mind and carry into your own life. The events worth leaving the house for. And woven through all of it, the lifestyle and the advice and the small, tender, human things that quietly draw us closer.

I picture a digital home for the days you need it, and a monthly print issue for the days you don’t — for when you want to settle into a chair, away from the glow, and feel informed and connected and a little delighted for a while. And I’ll confess to you a soft spot I’m not the least bit sorry for: I want to bring back the simple joys. Comics (illustrated and authored by real people) worth the careful cut of a scissor. A student spotlight bound for the refrigerator door. A coloring page to slide across to the toddler so you can finish your paragraph in peace. Recipes to clip and splatter and keep. Giveaways and friendly little contests. A return to gentler, simpler times — made for the way we actually live now.

That is the whole heart of it: curated content, community connection, shared learning, small pieces of joy, togetherness, simplicity, and meaning that lasts longer than a scroll. We aren’t setting out to fix the world. We just want to make it a little kinder, a little happier, one small and seemingly insignificant step at a time, right here on the ground my family has loved for two hundred years.

Which brings me, at last, to you — because none of this works unless it’s truly yours. So tell us what you want to see. Send us the story leads: the non-profit doing amazing work no one is noticing, the quiet hero everybody knows but no one’s written down, the little place the whole town adores. Tell us who deserves a profile and which events deserve a spotlight. The form is waiting on our website, and I promise you this — I read every word that comes through it myself.

The chair’s pulled out. The coffee’s on. We’re so glad you’re here.

Best,

Megan