I retired at the end of 2018 and bought the Lake Anna Breeze™ in February of 2019. I didn’t know very much about publishing a newspaper, so I had to learn as I went along. Once I got the hang of it, creating The Breeze™ was an absolute joy.

Over that five year period, I learned a little bit about publishing and was thrilled when sales of the newspaper continued to grow. More importantly, I learned a lot about Lake Anna and the wonderful people who call Lake Anna home. Here are a few of the “lessons“ I learned along the way.

Lake Anna isn’t a city or a town, but it’s definitely a community with numerous people who take pride in living here and contributing to our amazing standard of living. I learned that Lake Anna residents are charitable people who love the lake and work hard on making the community better. The Louisa Humane Society, Louisa Clean (road clean up organized and run by Jody Korman), the Lake Anna Business Partnership, the Lake Anna Civic Association and the Foundation for Lake Anna Emergency Services all make our community better.

If you want to be a part of Lake Anna in the future, consider joining and supporting these groups. You’ll make friends and you’ll feel good about your efforts.

Most of our local business owners are kind-hearted, hard-working people. Having owned several businesses during my career, I took great joy in getting to know the local business owners. Many of these entrepreneurs have become good friends, including Mike Kavros (Callie Opie’s Orchard), John Pope (Cooling Pond Brewery), and Mike Vallerie (Pleasants Landing). I know how hard these people work and I have great respect for them.

When I acquired the newspaper, I made a conscious decision to make The Breeze™ a “feel good” newspaper. We focused our articles and feature columns on helping people feel good about living at – or visiting – the lake.

While we did break a couple of stories along the way, including the Cutalong reopening and the announcement of the Lake Anna Resort, we focused the majority of our effort on helping people understand just how great Lake Anna is. Our mission was simple – we just wanted to help people feel good about being at Lake Anna. We quickly learned that our readers enjoyed the fact that we avoided controversy and focused our efforts on helping folks enjoy living or visiting Lake Anna.

Last, I came to know that the future is bright at Lake Anna! Publishing the Lake Anna Breeze™ gave us a little insight into what is happening now and what will be happening in the future. At the end of the day, we will have more people but will also have more restaurants, shops and fun things to do. Lake Anna is vibrant and alive and will only get better as time goes on.

Deciding to sell the newspaper was bittersweet. We really do want to see our grandchildren more (who live in California) and we just want to travel a little more in general.

We spent six months trying to figure out who we thought should acquire the newspaper. We feel like we made a terrific decision when we approached Jennifer Bailey. She’s talented and hard-working and will make The Breeze™ better than it has ever been before.

Many thanks to all of Lake Anna Breeze™ readers for a great five year run. We appreciate all of you and want to thank you for making the The Breeze™ a part of your Lake Anna experience.

Jim McCoy