News from the Neighborhood to the Southcoast

Newspapers.  Some say a soon to be extinct concept.

The industry around news has changed dramatically.

Cable/Satellite television is plastered with 24/7 news channels.  The Internet is saturated with all the news that is now able to be electronically printed, fit or not.

Have a smart phone?  You have the ability to link to find just about anything you want.

Indeed one no longer even has to  get  up to "read" the paper.  Just connect to the Internet, and you can view it, page by page on-line (they still make you pay for this feature though).

Fairhaven is serviced by two weekly newspapers and one daily.  Not bad for a town of just under 16,000 people; and, extremely fortunate.

Everyone loves the paper when the story is positive for them, and hates it when the opposite is true.

Criticisms abound about accuracy, the level of reporting, and the audacity of a paper to offer an opinion in an editorial.

The lack of coverage or extent of coverage (again depending on your point of view) is maddening to some, along with the timeliness of coverage, or the perceived slant of a "news" article.

Yet, with all the real and imagined faults of newspapers, think of just where we would be as a society without them.  Each time a paper folds, the ability to maintain a free society receives another small cut.

Throughout the history of this country, indeed the world, since the invention of the printing press, it has been through the "press" that information and ideas have flowed to the masses.

Newspapers have been and remain the one consistent avenue to insure the flow of information on the purely local level.  Take away your local papers, and just how informed would anyone be.

Each paper we have in this area serves a function.  

The fact that we do have that local daily is a significant plus to us.  It provides coverage in areas the weekly can not.

While more regional in approach to the weekly paper, your daily paper is what allows you to read about more than just your immediate area, it provides you with timely information and more insight into national and world news, and it allows us to to gain the broader perspective. 

Yet the weeklies devote coverage that the daily cannot.  A daily must appeal to a wider audience, thus more diverse coverage in areas some are not interested in.

The weeklies allow significant coverage of local issues.  How many letters to the editor specific to our town would we in fact see if we only had only had the one local daily? How many meetings would be covered?  

I have not always agreed with the editorials written in any paper.  But I understand and respect the need for an editorial/opinion section in any paper, and will defend the right of an editor or editorial board to print the editorial. 

As wonderful as the world wide web is, as much as you see newspapers morphing into new creatures composed of hard copies and electronic media, the ability to have that physical paper in hand will hopefully never disappear.

Hopefully neither will the desire and ability to report on the issues, nor the willingness to incur the wrath of readership in pursuit of reporting the news.