You are holding in your hands right now a very important, consequential, personal, and public documentation of the world you live in.
For years, we have been told print is dying. The future, we have been assured, is digital, where news can move faster, reach farther, and cost less. The smartphone and tablets would replace the newspaper, so the claim went, and eventually nobody would miss the paper at all.
Well, no doubt, computers – whether in our pockets or on our desks – are winning the information speed race. They can tell us what happened less than a minute earlier on the other side of the world. They can deliver breaking news even before a county meeting is over, a police report is finished, or a politician passes away. They also can tell you what somebody you don’t know, who lives three states away, ate for breakfast or watched on TV last night.
However, one thing your cellphone still can’t do particularly well is make you feel like you belong. Oh sure, it can help you find likeminded souls, especially if you’re deeply into cats, or origami, or vintage motorcycles, or hate-fueled political positions – regardless of your affiliations.
Still, no online community, not Facebook, not X, not Snapchat, NextDoor, or whatever fills your endless scrolling time, can provide what your community newspaper does.
A local newspaper isn’t just a delivery system for information. At its best, it is a community’s scrapbook, bulletin board, town square, and permanent record – all neatly folded together and delivered to your doorstep.
And unlike the internet, it doesn’t require you to remember where you saw something.
That’s more important than it sounds.
Online, yesterday’s story is already competing with today’s 47 new posts. Last week’s announcement has vanished beneath a mountain of reels, advertisements, arguments and photos of somebody’s lunch.
A newspaper gives things a little more staying power.
A photograph of a child receiving an award isn’t simply a photograph. It might become something a grandparent keeps. A story about a retiring teacher isn’t merely content. It becomes part of the historical record of the school. The names of volunteers, scholarship recipients, coaches, business owners and civic leaders become a written snapshot of who was here and what they were doing.
Years from now, somebody will care.
That’s one of the things local newspapers do that gets overlooked in the never-ending discussion about clicks, impressions, and page views.
We record ordinary life. And ordinary life is often what becomes history.
There’s another advantage to print: It demands less from the reader.
A newspaper doesn’t buzz in your pocket and announce that somebody has commented on something you posted eight years ago. It doesn’t interrupt a story to tell you that three people you have never met are currently arguing about politics.
It just sits there. You pick it up. You read. Maybe you set it down and come back to it later.
That makes print particularly well suited for the stories that require a little patience – the history of an old family business, a profile of someone who quietly spent decades serving the community, an explanation of a complicated local issue, or a feature about a place that may not make national headlines but means something to the people who live there.
Digital journalism has plenty of strengths. We would be foolish to ignore them.
If the high school football coach resigns at 10 a.m. Monday, readers shouldn’t have to wait until Thursday to find out.
That’s what the website is for. But the newspaper can be something different. It can slow things down.
It can put the news in context. It can give a community a chance to see itself – not as an audience being targeted by an algorithm, but as a collection of people who live in the same place.
The strongest local newspapers understand their competition isn’t really Facebook or Google or whatever social media platform happens to be fashionable this month.
Their competition is irrelevance. If a newspaper becomes nothing more than yesterday’s internet, it deserves to disappear.
But if it continues doing what the internet can’t do quite as well – preserving local history, recognizing local people, explaining local government, and reminding us that our neighbors’ lives are worth paying attention to – then there is still a very good reason to pick it up.
Because the internet remembers almost everything.
The newspaper remembers you – and us.