By: Forrest R. Church, Publisher
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
I will be honest — it has been a long time since I have sat down to type one of these columns. The last one ran late last year. I write because — half-kidding, of course — it is cheaper than therapy. The side effect is that you get to read whatever was on my mind this week, good, bad, or otherwise. Lucky you.
Truth is, I have had no shortage of topics rolling around in my head since before the holidays. But every time I sat down to write, I caught myself tilting toward the negative. I have no problem with the hard stuff when the moment calls for it — that is part of the job — but I do not want this column to turn into nothing but complaint.
Today is a check-in column. A sit-down with the readers I have missed — and a chance to share an important update that has been a long time coming.
What surprises me, when I am out and about across Northwest Ohio, is how often readers stop me and tell me they have missed the column. That always catches me off guard. I figured most of you were enjoying the quiet.
It means more than I can put into words when somebody mentions this little corner of OUR newspaper. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they respectfully disagree. Either way, an attaboy goes a long way in this line of work. Thank you for that.
PROFESSIONAL PONDERINGS
I think about the direction this newspaper is going day and night. This year marks our 25th year of publishing local news — we bought our first newspaper in August 2001 — and that milestone has me thinking bigger picture than usual. That kind of thinking is hard to do at a keyboard when 1,500 emails are hitting the inbox and the phone is ringing every thirty seconds. Writing a column under those conditions is hard, too.
There has not been a particular crisis that has caused my writing to slow down. There rarely is, when I get quiet. It is usually the opposite — too many irons in the fire and not enough time to step back and ask the harder questions. Is this going the direction we want it to? Are we serving readers the way we promised? What are we missing? And — oh yes — I had better find a few hours to write a column.
Those are not easy questions to answer in fifteen-minute increments between fires. So the column went on the back burner.
TOWNSHIP MEETINGS — A LONG TIME COMING
If you have been a regular reader, you have noticed our local news coverage has expanded — significantly. We are now covering township meetings across Williams and Fulton Counties at a level you will not find anywhere else in our area.
Readers have asked for this for years — decades, actually. As long as I have been in this job, somebody at a chamber lunch or in the post office line has asked, “Why don’t you cover what is going on at our township?” The honest answer was that we did not have the staff or the dollars to do it right.
Here is the part worth understanding. We sell copies and subscriptions essentially at cost — everything we are able to do is funded by advertisement sales. So when you start talking about covering twenty-four townships at one or two meetings a month each, you can imagine the cost (payroll, gas, print space, etc.).
We had been planning this coverage for years. Then COVID put it on hold. The tariff-driven cost increases on newsprint and plates kept it there. The modest subscription rate increase earlier this year is what finally got us off the fence.
I had been putting off two decisions, back to back — one because nobody likes telling readers their paper costs more, the other because the math was always going to be tight, if not impossible. As much as I hated raising rates, I would not have asked you to pay more without putting that money to work in a way you could see on the page.
Here is something else worth saying outright. We approach this the same way we approach sports — we do not pick and choose which teams to cover. Every team in our coverage area gets a shot no matter their record. Same goes for townships. It was never going to be three or four favorites. All, or none. Big or small, win or lose, every community deserves the same shot at being seen.
Here is why most media outlets do not do regular township coverage, and I am not throwing rocks: it is hard and expensive. Most outlets only show up when somebody tips them off that there is a fight on the agenda. Grab a quote, write the controversy story, leave.
Regular township coverage means showing up when nothing is happening, too — when the trustees are approving routine expenditures, debating a road project, or hearing a resident’s drainage issue. Because that is also the meeting where, two months later, something quietly gets decided that affects every property owner on that road. Showing up when nothing is happening is the only way to be there when something does.
And townships are only part of the expanded coverage. We have been expanding feature articles and non-sports community coverage across the board — the people pieces, small-business spotlights, church and civic events that get crowded out when the news cycle tilts toward conflict. The same equal-coverage standard applies.
BEHIND THE COVERAGE
Let me be perfectly clear about how difficult this is to pull off with twenty-four townships in our coverage area.
Some nights there are only a handful of meetings on the calendar. Other nights — you have probably noticed this on our community calendar — every village council, every township board, every school board, and every committee in two counties decides to schedule at the exact same hour on the exact same evening. Some weeks I wonder if there is an unwritten rulebook telling everyone to meet on the third Monday at 7 p.m.
If we had thirty people on staff, there are nights we still could not put a body in every seat. And we do not have thirty people. Nobody in community journalism does anymore.
When we cannot be in the room, we chase the minutes after the fact. That is better than nothing, but it is not the same as being present. Minutes tell you what was decided. They do not tell you the tone in the room, a resident’s question from the back of the gallery, or the look on a trustee’s face when a particular number got read out loud. Firsthand reporting is always a step better than secondhand.
There is also a legal wrinkle worth mentioning. Ohio law requires meeting minutes to be prepared promptly and made available for public inspection, but the statute does not spell out what “promptly” means — there is no specific deadline, such as 72 hours, that would settle the question. Courts have generally read it to mean without unreasonable delay, regardless of when trustees formally approve the minutes at the next meeting. That language is fine for lawyers and frustrating for everyone else. It is unfair to media trying to inform readers on deadline, unfair to residents who want to review what was decided, and unfair to township leaders themselves, left guessing at what “reasonable” means. Some townships turn minutes around in days. Others take weeks or even a month.
Worth knowing if you try to follow along at home: a handful of townships have started taking the position that they will not release unofficial or draft minutes until the trustees formally approve them at the next meeting — up to a month away. That position is hard to square with Ohio’s general approach to public records, which treats records in a government’s possession as public whether or not they carry an official stamp. In most cases, you should not have to wait for formal approval to see what was discussed.
Which has come as a shock to some township leadership. These meetings have historically been lightly attended — unless a data center is threatening to buy local land — and suddenly there is a reporter in the back of the room at least once a month. We are doing our best to be a respectful guest who has an important job to do.
If you ever wonder why one township got a full story this week and the next one over only got a brief, that is almost always why.
ALL CHIPS IN
I started this column noting it means a lot when readers mention these columns. It means just as much when readers tell me they have noticed the township coverage. You have no idea how much that registers with the writers, photographers, and editors putting in the late hours.
We are “all chips in” with The Village Reporter. I hope our team, our community leaders, and our readers all know that. The Village Reporter is OUR newspaper — yours and ours, together — and we are going to keep showing up to the meetings, keep telling the stories, and keep doing our best to give Williams and Fulton Counties the kind of community journalism most parts of America no longer have.
BEFORE I GO
My free hours in a given week can be counted on one hand, and most of them need to belong to my family. But sitting down to knock out this return column was enjoyable. Especially when most of what I had to share was positive news about our expanded coverage.
I am not going to promise this column is back on a regular schedule. Not weekly. Not every other week. Not even monthly. What I can promise: I will do my best to write one when a topic genuinely comes to mind and I think it will give you more than it takes from you.
I remain optimistic that great days are ahead for our community newspaper, our small Northwest Ohio towns, and our country. We have come too far together to think otherwise.
Thank you for all your support — for picking up the paper week after week, for keeping subscriptions current when budgets are tight, for caring about local news when much of America has stopped, and for being the kind of community that makes work like this worth doing. None of this works without you.