By: Forrest R. Church, Publisher
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
I hope everyone is soaking in this time of year. Fall is my favorite season, hands down. The leaves are starting to change and there’s a little crisp in the air in the mornings. The combines are out in the fields too, so if you get stuck behind one on a county road this month, take a breath and give a wave.
I’m freshly back from the National Newspaper Association convention, which this year was not so far away in Detroit, Michigan. It is always an honor to brush shoulders with others in this industry and exchange ideas – what’s working, what’s not, and what everybody is doing about the price of paper (short answer: complaining, same as me).
I’ll be honest, those few days are a reset and a recharge that I need. There are weeks in this job, usually somewhere in the middle of a triple-digit work week, when I’m sitting at the keyboard late at night asking myself, what in the world am I doing? Being around people who fight the same fight for the same reasons reminds me why.
This week, October 4-10, is National Newspaper Week. It has been celebrated every year since 1940, which makes this the 86th one. As best I can tell, in all these years I’ve never written a column about it.
This year it means a little more to me than usual. As America celebrated its 250th this summer, I’ve been celebrating our 25th year of publishing local news. We bought our first community newspaper in 2001, and somehow 25 years have gone by in what feels like about 25 minutes. America’s 250th, our 25th and National Newspaper Week all in the same year – I couldn’t let that one slide by without saying something.
With the newspaper business more tricky than it has ever been, I think it’s important to take a few minutes and remind readers why your community newspaper matters. This year’s theme is “Rooted in Community, Committed to Truth.” I couldn’t have picked a better one myself.
Rooted In Community
That first newspaper was The Advance Reporter, the same paper I started out writing sports for back in the 1990s when I was a student at Hilltop High School. Back then it was a six-page weekly that mostly covered West Unity and Stryker.
In 2010, The Advance Reporter, The Edon Commercial and The Wauseon Reporter merged into what is now The Village Reporter, and we expanded our coverage out to the rest of the towns across Williams and Fulton Counties. Our first edition as The Village Reporter came out in July 2010. Today we generally run 48 pages or more every Wednesday, with news online daily in between, and the newspapers we carry on have roots locally dating back to the 1870s.
We’re not outsiders who drive in when there’s a fire or a fight on the agenda, grab a quote and leave. We live here. Our kids go to these schools, we sit in these bleachers, and yes, we get stopped in the grocery store about why somebody’s grandson didn’t get a bigger photo.
Committed To Truth
Here’s a secret from within our office I’ve shared before: the first question we ask anyone who wants to write for us is, can you check your opinions at the door and write the facts, even when the facts don’t line up with your own views? That’s Journalism 101. It’s also a pretty good way to get yelled at by both sides in the same week. If the left and the right are both mad at us over the same story, frankly, we probably got it correct.
And with election season here, we’re about to get plenty of practice. The Columbus Dispatch reported the ad spending on Ohio’s U.S. Senate race alone is closing in on $300 million. I can promise you not one dollar of that is paying for somebody to sit in the back of your township meeting on a Tuesday night when the only thing on the agenda is a culvert. That’s our job. We give you the facts, and you make up your own mind.
Let me share a few numbers that were passed around for this year’s National Newspaper Week. According to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, close to 3,500 newspapers have disappeared in the United States since 2005, another 148 in the past year alone. About 50 million Americans now have little or no access to local news, and nearly 80 percent of the country’s so-called “news deserts” are in rural counties. Rural counties like ours.
The studies on what happens when a town loses its newspaper aren’t pretty. There’s simply no accountability for government anymore. Nobody is sitting in on the school board or the village council, nobody is asking how the tax dollars are being spent, and nobody notices when something gets quietly decided that affects every property owner on the road. When nobody is watching, it opens the door for some very negative activities. The research points to more corruption, higher costs of government and fewer people bothering to vote.
Then there are the big chains. Many have bought up community newspapers, including some right here locally, and either closed them down to get rid of the advertising competition or centralized the work somewhere far away, leaving a skeleton crew behind to cover the town.
I get it. In corporate America, on a spreadsheet, that makes a lot of sense. I’m just not sure it makes a lot of sense in our little farm villages. To be fair, a skeleton crew is still better than the closures I’ve written about all too often.
So I’m still mixed on it. Maybe I’m just a poor businessman. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have the corporate wisdom some folks have when it comes to a P&L statement. But if the choice is between a better-looking spreadsheet and a reporter in the room at your village council meeting, I know which one I’m going to pick every time.
That’s a big reason why this year we started covering township meetings across all 24 townships in our coverage area. All of them, or none. Big or small.
The People Behind It
National Newspaper Week is also about recognizing the people who make a newspaper happen. Our writers and photographers put real miles on their vehicles, from Edon (basically Indiana) to Swanton (basically Toledo). Our advertising team sells the ads that pay for those miles – we sell copies and subscriptions at about what it costs to print and mail them, so advertising pays for nearly everything you read. Our office staff keeps things running day in and day out, and the folks who get the paper to your mailbox or your screen make sure it actually reaches you.
Together, they print the stuff nobody else will. Every team at every school gets the same shot at coverage, win or lose. Honor rolls, senior spotlights, kids’ Christmas wishes. And obituaries, which we’ve always published free for families with ties to Williams and Fulton Counties – by my best estimate, that has saved grieving families around $4 million over the years.
This spring the Ohio News Media Association named us Overall Runner-Up for Division A Newspaper of the Year, along with 12 awards, eight of them first place. One line from the judges stuck with me: “Readers could tell the staff cares about all of its readers.” I’m not bringing it up to brag. Okay, maybe a little.
Ken Paulson, who heads the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, wrote a piece for this year’s National Newspaper Week suggesting readers grade their own newspaper. I liked it enough to borrow his questions:
Does my paper carry more news about my town than any other outlet?
Does it keep an eye on government and the people in power?
Does it tell me what I need to know, and sometimes surprise me?
Is it fair? (Read every local story in an edition before you answer that one, not just the headlines.)
Is it professional, and when it makes a mistake, does it fix it?
Does it truly care about the community it serves?
If we pass, thank you. If we don’t, tell me where we fell short. I would much rather hear it from you directly than read about it in a comment section.
How You Can Help
I’m not asking for a cookie. But if you care about keeping local news alive in Williams and Fulton Counties, here’s what actually helps.
Subscribe, or keep your subscription current.
Give a gift subscription to someone who moved away – the kid at college, the grandchild in the service, the friend who retired south and still asks what’s going on back home.
Shop with the businesses that advertise with us, and tell them you saw it in The Village Reporter.
If you’d like to do more, our newsroom tip jar is still there. It’s completely voluntary, and 100 percent of it goes to sending writers and photographers out into your community.
And send us your news – the birthday, the anniversary, the Eagle Scout, the church dinner. We can’t print what we don’t know about.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” I’m not sure Jefferson ever sat through a two-hour township drainage discussion, but I’d like to think he would have stayed until the end.
Twenty-five years in, I still believe every community deserves a newspaper that shows up. Thank you for picking up the paper week after week, for keeping your subscriptions current when budgets are tight, and for caring about local news when much of America has stopped. The Village Reporter is OUR newspaper – yours and ours, together.
I remain optimistic that great days are ahead for our community newspaper, our small Northwest Ohio towns, and our country.
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That’s it for this week. I’d love to hear from you. As always, feel free to reach out to me at publisher@thevillagereporter.com or via mail at 115 Broad Street, Montpelier, Ohio 43543.
