This week The New Era is 85 years old.
Yes, I know the volume number on the front page indicates that we’re not quite there yet, but that’s because someone, somewhere along the line, decided to start each new volume on Jan. 1. Since it was that way when I slid into the driver’s seat of your local newspaper, I decided not to mess with it.
(As it was, I once forgot to have our staff change the volume number on Jan. 1 and it was wrong for several months until I did the math. Stuff happens.)
The point is, though, we know that The New Era was founded Sept. 28, 1929 by a local doctor. We have the original front page on our office wall.
You can read all about that in our anniversary section starting on page 9. It’s an interesting history.
One thing that’s significant to me about my predecessors at this newspaper is their longevity. In 85 years there have only been eight publishers and a couple of those stayed only a year or two. The other six have been, essentially, lifers.
They had an intense interest in this community.
Now-retired Sweet Home High School football coach Rob Younger once told me that when he arrived in Sweet Home, he only intended to stay a few years. The athletic director who hired him, as I recall the story, told him, “Sweet Home has a funny way of growing on you.”
Well, we know it did with Rob, who still lives here some three decades later, and Sweet Home apparently has had that effect on nearly all the publishers who’ve steered this ship.
Running a newspaper has always been tough. There are a lot of moving parts, constantly changing scenarios that you work in, never-ending lists of things you could be doing, and now, particularly with e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, cellphones, digital cameras and all the other technical wonders we have, constant stimuli.
In days gone by, publishers printed the paper themselves, with hot lead type, so not only did they have to write it, but they had to have the technical knowledge to print it. Printers are essentially mechanics, because there are so many moving parts that something seemingly is always going kaput.
These days we have our printing done elsewhere, on a web press owned and operated by a company that specializes in newspapers and other such products. It’s a lot easier and it offers your publisher more time to answer the phone – or check that e-mail.
We hear about the demise of newspapers and many are on the ropes, but I’m convinced that in most cases it’s because of poor management. I’m not talking about management from the financial standpoint, the kind a stockholder is interested in. I’m talking about preserving something that is integral to the health and welfare of a community – their newspaper.
When you cut the guts – the local news coverage – out of a community paper to try to squeeze an extra buck or two out of it for the stockholders, your newspaper is not going to last long. If you’re not publishing stories about interesting local people doing interesting things, well, people can read AP wire stories just about anywhere these days.
If, on the other hand, you faithfully cover the community – the City Council and School Board meetings, the sports, the festivals, the people who make a difference, all those interesting people doing interesting things – then I say your newspaper will survive.
The New Era has covered Sweet Home for 85 years and thanks to a supportive readership and advertisers who understand that this is an effective way to communicate their messages to those readers, we’re still coming out each and every week.
Watching other newspapers shrivel into shells of what they once were is very painful to me, having been involved in journalism for about 35 years now.
For me, journalism has to be more than just a job. In Sweet Home The New Era has played an important role in helping people understand what’s going on around them and giving them things to think about as they vote, as they plan, as they cooperate in community projects and as they follow and convey what’s happening in what is the lifeblood of many small communities – sports. It’s worth the work.
Eighty-five years is a long time, though it’s not particularly ancient in the newspaper world. It’s long enough to establish a legacy, though, and a legacy has been established: one of commitment to this community and its residents to report only what we are convinced is true, without fear or favor, and to keep it as interesting as possible.
If we can do that, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if future generations are still reading some form of The New Era many years from now.