Next week, Sunday, October 1, through Saturday, October 7, is National Newspaper Week. The annual observance of the service that newspapers and their employees provide to their communities has been in existence since 1940; what is printed within the pages of newspapers has certainly changed since then, but the importance of the medium has not. And here at the West Essex Tribune, we are proud to be one of the only remaining independent newspapers in the state, bringing our community the stories that matter to them.The newspaper looks a heck of a lot different than it did eight decades ago (and longer for us, as we first started printing 94 years ago, in 1929), but we’re still here, and proud of it. For nine-plus decades, the Tribune has been tailored to our town, emphasizing the things that affect us most directly and keeping track of what is going on in the township so that our readers don’t have to worry about missing anything. We have been happy to have you all along for the ride.And what a ride it has been, despite the fact that we have been told that “newspapers are dead,” for several decades and counting. Eric Meyer, editor and publisher of the Marion County (Kansas) Record, said it best in his own editorial earlier this month: “We’ve all heard the grim assessment. But it didn’t come this year, when corporate greed downsized far too many newsrooms. It didn’t come 15 years ago, when social media began to cocoon us into echo chambers that let us hear only what we believe. It didn’t come 30 years ago, at the dawn of the Internet letting us browse multiple sources of information. It didn’t come 45 years ago, when cable news channels began giving us talking heads, mouthing the same points over and over…. As Mark Twain would have noted, reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.And it’s not because we’ve been turned into unkillable zombies. We haven’t died because democracy needs us, and smart people nationwide know it.”If the Marion County Record sounds familiar, it is because you may have heard that, earlier this summer, in a terrifying attack on our democracy and the First Amendment rights our country was founded upon, the paper was raided by authorities. Electronics and reporting materials were seized, not just at the newsroom, but at the homes of employees. Experts contend that ...
