A new paper

Ralph Nader is in the news again. This time, he’s printing it. The 88-year-old consumer advocate extraordinaire and occasional oddball presidential candidate has started the Winsted Citizen, a community newspaper in his hometown of Winsted, Conn. Mr. Nader told the AP that he missed the feel of newsprint in his hands and suspected many of his neighbors did as well. (It’s an addiction, all right.)

Mr. Nader grew up with the Winsted Journal; it closed in 2017. Of the absence of a local paper in a community, he said, “After a while it all congeals, and you start losing history. Every year you don’t have a newspaper, you lose that connection.”

He hopes to reverse a decades-long trend that’s ushered in the near extinction of local papers. Mr. Nader expresses that his latest project will “be a good model for the rest of the country.”

He invested $15,000 in startup costs and hired a veteran Connecticut journalist to run it. The paper is starting off as a monthly publication with a roster of 17 local freelance reporters. It’ll generate revenue from advertising, subscriptions and donations with plans to go weekly next January.

Annual subscriptions started out at $25 for the remainder of 2023 and will go up to $95 in ’24. The first issue was 12 pages and included a long feature on a successful local basketball coach and a story about a planned five-story mural on two abandoned mill buildings in the town of about 8,000 people.

Most news junkies in Connecticut are rooting for the paper to succeed, one even suggesting that Mr. Nader could trade on his celebrity status to land foundation grants to help keep the paper in the black.

The paper will “work for you,” its masthead declares. And won’t be used as a mouthpiece for its publisher’s politics.

And now that publisher hopes to make it easier for his neighbors to connect with their community with a local printed newspaper filled by local writers with local stories, local obituaries, local notices. May his presses long run.