By David Trinko
The Lima News
There are more letters to the editor right now than there’s room to put them in print.
Our news reporters cover more news stories each week than there are inches of space to present them on paper too.
The same can be said for our sports reporters, who still watch our youth play a sundry of sports nearly every night of the week, with all those game stories going on LimaOhio.com.
So you’ll have to forgive me if I get a little sour when someone tries to tell me the local newspaper is dead.
“The report of my death was an exaggeration,” Mark Twain wrote to a newspaper reporter back in 1897, but it seems just as true today.
Next week marks the 84th National Newspaper Week, an opportunity to reflect on the role of local journalism in our lives when it comes to news, sports and opinions.
We can each all think what we think about the big national news sources.
Good local journalists, on the other hand, bring you something no one else can. They have inquisitive minds and a willingness to question the status quo. They bring a local eye and local experiences to local issues.
Frankly, we’re not always the most warmly welcomed people at a party. Some of it is our vocation, telling people things they don’t always want to hear. Some of it’s the side-effect of having ink running through your veins, where your personality becomes introspective and caustic. The industry draws more than its share of introverts.
We don’t do the work to make friends, though. We do it because we’re obsessed with finding out the truth. In this ever-changing world, that could mean finding out what we thought was the truth yesterday actually wasn’t.
I think about a quote by founding father Thomas Jefferson, who honestly wasn’t a big fan of newspapers. (He once wrote “truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”)
Still, he wrote, “Were it left to me to decide if we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
The good news is we’re not at that crossroads today.
I know many readers were frustrated by the decision to go from seven-day delivery of a printed newspaper to two days a week of delivery in May 2023. Perhaps we didn’t express strongly enough how much the rising costs of printing and delivery choked our ability to thrive. Maybe we weren’t clear enough that most readers already switched to online consumption 10 years earlier.
We all hate change, particularly changes to our daily habits. I respect that, and honestly I’m a bit flattered that we’re that important to people’s lives that they’d be that angry.
Fortunately, we’ve stabilized ourselves, economically speaking. We’re on solid ground now that we require subscriptions to read more than a handful of stories per month online. The most common complaint about us online is that you can’t read our stories for free. We average more than 30 news items posted per day on LimaOhio.com.
We made hard but necessary choices, focusing our efforts on good, local journalism.
You truly seem to care. There’s literally a back-up of letters to the editor to include. After averaging 14 letters printed per month through September, we’ve already printed 10 in October, with more ready to go already for next Wednesday’s edition.
We can see from online trends how important it is that we continue the important but admittedly mundane work of compiling and sharing public records, with thousands of you reading them every week online.
Our staff is learning how to improve its work by focusing online first. Our sports game stories are nearly twice as long and detailed as anything we could’ve printed in the past. I know when I cover a game each week, I’m happy to have the time and space to talk to a few players, still trying doggedly to get it online before 11 p.m.
Has journalism changed in recent years? Absolutely. Everything in life has. The important thing is we keep working on your behalf, sharing local news, sports and opinions.
ONLY ON LIMAOHIO.COM
See past columns by David Trinko at LimaOhio.com/tag/trinko.
David Trinko is editor of The Lima News. Reach him at 567-242-0467, by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Lima_Trinko.
