The Importance of Your Local Newspaper

Follow @stephanpastis on Twitter. He gets it.

As many of you know, I'm the features editor at The Herald-Palladium. That's my official title. But I'm also our Facebook manager. That means I'm the guy who's sharing stories and reading comments. All of the comments. Which means I have to read comments like these (often):

• Why do you charge us to read your stories?
• Why do you bother posting this on Facebook if we can't read it?
• Just wait half an hour and you'll find the same story on (nearby radio station or TV station website).

Our online stories are behind what's known as a paywall. It means you can read a few stories every month for free, but then we ask you to pay to continue reading other stories. Do you know who's complaining about the paywall? The people who have clicked on enough stories to go through their free stories for the month. We are producing a product that they want, but they don't think they should have to pay for it.

Do you know how much a monthly online subscription costs? $10.

I understand everyone has a budget, but for less than what you pay for Neflix you have access to our entire website, and our daily e-edition. We are at council meetings so you don't have to be. We interview local candidates so you know who is trying to represent your interests. We take pictures of your kids, we announce your engagements, we cover your high school sporting events. We let you know when a new business comes to town, and we let you know when one leaves. We share stories of the past, and we tell you what the future holds.

We are your local source of information ... and the radio station's, and the TV stations' and Moody on the Market's, too. A TV reporter told one of our reporters recently, "We don't know what we'd do without you guys." Go ahead, pick up a newspaper every day, and then tune into the 6 o'clock news every evening, and you'll see how often a watered-down version of our story ends up on our "reporting partners'" airwaves.

So how much local news do you think you'll find on the TV news, or your friendly neighborhood news blog, if there's no local newspaper? Who will document your family's history? The births, the deaths and everything in between? Where will your ancestors turn to find your life story?

Next time, instead of complaining that your local newspaper tries to promote its product on social media (something thousands of others businesses do every single day), think about supporting it. We are coming to you where you're at in every attempt to keep you informed. It's an important job, but it's not one we can do for free.