You might notice that this edition of your local newspaper has some heft to it.
It’s election season, and that means more advertisements from some of those hopeful candidates, but also more information – even with larger papers, sometimes it’s hard to fit in everything that’s happening around town, from community events and sports to crime and politics.
This is also National Newspapers Week in Canada, a good time to consider the importance of print news.
There’s been a lot of changes in how print news is delivered during the past few centuries.
Newspapers started out at the tail end of the 17th century and the early 18th century as cheap broadsides, often with extremely sharp political leanings – they were more like modern blogs or partisan political commentary sites than news outlets as we know them today.
It took well over a century for the basic ideas of what a newspaper was to settle down, including a commitment to accuracy.
But by the 20th century, the idea of a newspaper and what it did was so ingrained in reporting that it was carried over wholesale into radio, TV, and cable news channels. All of them base their ideals of reporting – whether they meet them all the time or not – on the ideals of a newspaper.
But newspapers were evolving alongside all these new media forms as well.
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Even before the internet upended the media business, there had been massive changes, in printing, in colour photography, even in photography itself, which not long ago was still pretty expensive and difficult for smaller papers. It was used a lot more sparingly half a century ago, for example.
The delivery method has changed, too. You might be reading this online, on a phone, tablet, or computer monitor. You might be reading it in print form, delivered directly to your home.
Regardless of how you receive it, the news remains the news.
There still isn’t anything that can successfully replace print news for breadth and depth of coverage – and that goes double for local news.
Keeping a vibrant local media ecosystem running is in the best interests of everyone, from local business owners to politicians (and would-be politicians), from longtime residents to newcomers trying to find their way in the community.
The job of local papers is to tell the community’s story to itself. That means we rely on our readers to be a part of our efforts, to reach out, through social media or email or by phone, to let us know what’s going on.
Working together, we can keep telling that story for generations to come.