To give you an inkling as to the caliber of reporter the Iola Register has recently acquired, Sarah Haney was recognized Tuesday evening by Nevada, Mo.’s city council, for her work covering city politics for the Nevada Daily Mail.
Haney joined the Register staff Nov. 13.
For the past five-plus years, Haney had been a one-woman show at the Daily Mail, which publishes four days a week. Haney wrote the bulk of its stories, took the photos, laid out the pages, sent them off to be printed and posted the news to its website.
“I got tired of seeing only my byline,” Haney said of her decision to leave her hometown paper. “It’s also nice to be a part of a team.”
Haney’s great-uncle, Carl Simpson, was a longtime newspaperman, owning the Nevada News, a weekly publication. Rust Communications of Cape Girardeau purchased both her great-uncle’s publication and the Daily Mail as well as the Fort Scott Tribune in 1997.
The purchases eventually sent her great-uncle into retirement, while his daughter, Julie Simpson, then-publisher of the Nevada Daily News, pursued another career.
“Journalism is in my blood,” Haney said. “Uncle Carl always told me I’d be a writer one day. Newspapers have a special place in my heart.”
Haney, age 35, grew up as one of six children in Nevada. After high school she attended Cottey College, majoring in English.
From there she took a job at The Daily Mail as an editorial assistant, a glamorized title for grunt work: proofreading copy, writing up the police report, and turning long lists into copy.
“At some point I was made lifestyles editor, though that position no longer exists,” she said. 
After six years, Haney was ready for a change and took on with the Fayetteville, Ark., newspaper, the Democrat-Gazette, where she was an advertorial writer, writing promotional copy for large advertisers.
The heartstrings — and a sizable promotion at the Daily Mail — pulled her back to Nevada, where she still calls home.
As editor of the Daily Mail, Haney covered the city, county and school beats as well as wrote feature stories.
“It was a lot for one person in a county of 20,000,” she said.
As a staff of one, she says she “rattled around” the otherwise empty office space.
