We proudly present Progress 2025

By the time some of you pick this newspaper up Wednesday afternoon, the office at the Chronicle will be locked up and we won’t be there. Why? A celebration will be taking place at a local restaurant.
That celebration is for a good cause. The 2025 Custer County Chronicle and Hill City Prevailer News Progress Editions are out the door. They are out of our lives. For another year, at least. The Progress Edition is truly a labor of love, but there should be an emphasis on the labor part of that phrase. The Progress Edition is a lot of work. And we mean a lot of work.
Within this issue is an extra 32 pages of content, all designed and telling you all about the progress and good things going on in Custer County. Whether it’s a new business, an expanding business or progress on infrastructure, you’ll read all about it within these pages. We believe the 32 pages might be a record. At the very least, it’s the most we have had in several years.
To offer you a peek behind the curtain, the Progress Edition is a monumental task for our small but mighty staff. Work began on this issue in late January when the first ad was built. As we did that we planned which stories we would write about for the issue. Some people have a puzzled look on their face when you’re interviewing them in February and tell them the story will come out in mid-April, but we have to start on it in February or we would never get it done. There is just too much work to be done. The ad building starts immediately, and as the stories are completed they are put on the layout. Each and every person on staff is heavily involved, and on top of doing all of this we have to continue to focus on putting out a regular paper, putting out Down Country Roads magazine, etc. You get the idea—there isn’t a whole lot of down time between those initial planning meetings and the day we send the Progress Edition to the press.
Lest we forget, we simply could not do this without the support of our advertisers. They are what makes the annual Progress Edition possible. Do us a big favor. If you like what you see in these pages, thank one of our advertisers for making it happen. Better yet, buy something at their business. The more advertising we have, the more great news we can bring you about all the exciting things going on in the county. We truly believe advertising in this issue is a value, as it is our biggest and best read issue of the year.
A big thank you to you, our readers, as well. Without eyes on the pages of the paper, it ceases to exist.  The reason there is always progress to report is because this county is full of people who are always getting things done. There’s no better proof of that than the 32 pages of the Progress Edition.
Each and every year we wonder if we are going to have to scrape for stories to put in this issue, but it is never the case. Custer is too vibrant and too active for that to be the case. There is always something going on, and there is always someone trying something new and exciting. You’ll find all that within these pages. We hope you enjoy the read.