Yes, community newspapers still matter

Let’s have some fun.

That’s what I’ve been telling our editorial staff in the short time since I was named editor of Imperial Valley Press, and that’s what we have in mind for our readers.

One of the best reasons to do anything is because it’s fun.

It certainly isn’t for the money — at least not in the news business. Shoot, we still have people who tell us we should be doing this for free.

As if.

I’m old enough to remember when just about everybody took a newspaper.

They might not take the same one. Back where I’m from most took the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but there were also quite a number of subscribers to the now-defunct Globe-Democrat.

One of my instructors at the University of Missouri was a former editor at the Globe-Democrat.

She was a severe and classic news warrior, the kind you might think would flunk you back to grammar school if you turned in a weak lead.

Newspapers mattered to everyone back then. They were where you found the best reporting, where you found the latest sports scores, where you found the most provocative columns, where you found the schedules and where you found the best deals.

Every once in a while someone will tell me no one reads the newspaper anymore, which is ridiculous, because whenever we publish something people don’t like, they threaten to stop reading us.

How can they stop reading us if they weren’t doing it to begin with?

The fact is newspapers still matter. Newspapers have a unique relationship with the communities they serve. A community’s attitude toward a newspaper is quite different than it is with any other media.

People might identify with a television show or a radio personality, but few people really identify with a particular station.

Everybody owns the newspaper, even if they don’t subscribe to it. They know what we printed, and they know what we didn’t.

They know what we got right, and they know what we screwed up. They’ll let us know about it, too. That’s always been fine with me. I’ve been saying since I got here four years ago this newspaper is more than a century old: If we haven’t ticked people off in all that time, we haven’t been doing this right.

The idea here isn’t always to make everyone agree with us, but we do want people to be interested in what we have to say.

And we want to be a paper that pays attention to what our community has to say. We won’t always agree with you, either.

But that’s kind of what makes these relationships fun.

Today marks a rebirth of sorts for the Imperial Valley Press. We’ve redesigned the publication from top to bottom to make it more reader-friendly, more contemporary and — we hope — more relevant.

No doubt I’ll go through this thing once it’s off the press and find something I wish we would have done differently. There’s no doubt you probably will, too.

And if that happens let me know. We’re here to put out a paper everyone can be proud of, and this is just the start.