Five Points – Are Newspapers Important?

by Wendell Lenhart, Publisher
Trenton Republican-Times
National Newspaper Week is Oct. 4-Oct. 10, when we celebrate the importance of newspapers to their local communities. With the continued intrusion of social media into our lives, I think it’s important to highlight the differences between social media and true journalism practiced by newspapers employing independent, local, professional journalists.
The political cartoon on this page makes an important point: A large amount of information shared on social media is not complete, is out of context or simply not true.
To practice journalism is to report the facts. To do that we must verify information or attribute it to someone else and tell you whom that person is if you want to challenge what they are reporting. That is called the discipline of verification and it’s the essence of the news media.
Social media has no discipline, hardly any verification and it emphasizes opinion. Users are trying to pass their opinions off as fact, which they are not.
Newspapers separate fact from opinion, reserving their views for the editorial page which you are reading right now.
Having factual information about your community, schools and local government is the only way to make the correct decisions on how your tax dollars are spent and how to vote for candidates for public office and tax levies.
Small newspapers are the primary media which have dedicated local journalists providing coverage in rural areas. If this source of information dries up, it will leave persons with the impossible task of trying to sift through information on the Internet and trying to figure out what news is, in fact, true and what is made up.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit this year, many newspapers, including this one, were struggling with the loss of revenue from advertisers and subscribers. And it’s this revenue that allows us to employ the journalists to write the facts about what is going on, both good and bad, in our communities.
If you think what we do is important, we need your support. Subscribe to the newspaper. We offer many payment options that will allow you to do so.
Advertise in our publications and/or support those businesses that are already advertising there. That allows them to continue to do so. They sell more products and services and it benefits us and them at the same time.
We are in challenging times and it will be interesting to see how the future of our communities unfolds over the next few years.