Tomorrow (Thursday) this newspaper will celebrate 117 years of publishing, a milestone so large it is hard to fully hold in your head. It means this paper has been here through generations of families, through boom years and lean years, through wars, elections, droughts, fights, celebrations, tragedies, graduations, championships and all the ordinary life that makes a community a community.
And for the last two of those years, somehow, it has been mine. I recently celebrated two years as the owner of this newspaper and I still feel the same thing I felt when I first took it over: excitement. Maybe even more of it now, because I understand better what this paper is, what it has been and what it still can become.
Owning a 117-year-old newspaper is a funny thing. It is a business, with bills to pay, ads to sell, subscriptions to renew, websites to fix, papers to print and a hundred little fires to put out every week. But it is also something much bigger than that. A newspaper is one of the few businesses where the product is not just the thing you sell but the record you leave behind.
That responsibility still feels enormous, but it is also the reason to keep going. I bought this paper because I believed this area deserved a strong local newspaper and two years in, I believe that more than ever. We live in a time when people can know what is happening across the world instantly and still not know what their own city council did last week.
That is where a newspaper like this still matters. At its best, this paper should be a democracy-hardening institution, the kind of local journalistic presence that makes public bodies a little more careful, public money a little more visible and public decisions a little harder to make quietly. It should help people understand the place they live and give them the information they need to take part in it.
We are not all the way there yet, but I can see it starting to come into its own again. I see it in the stories we are chasing, the records we are asking for, the meetings we are sitting through, the website we are building and the video and audio work we are beginning to grow. I see it when people stop us to say they read something, noticed something or want us to look into something.
This newspaper has already lived a very long life, but I do not think its best years are behind it. I think there is room to grow it into something stronger, sharper and more useful, while still honoring the history that made it worth saving in the first place.
So 117 years in and two years into my small part of that story, I am grateful. Grateful for the readers who still believe local news matters, for the businesses that advertise and make the work possible and for the people who call, email, stop by, argue with us, encourage us and keep us pointed toward the things that matter. This paper belongs to its community more than it belongs to any one owner and I am proud to be the person carrying it right now.
