Producing a small local newspaper is not, strictly speaking, "journalism" in the stereotyped way that most people think about it. It's a complicated balance of what people in a town need to know, what they want to know about (and will bother to read), and what they want other people to know. It's impossible to please everyone, and many is the week in which you're lucky to please anybody. But the function served by a weekly town newspaper is different than that of a daily big city newspaper.

Small town weeklies used to be ubiquitous in New England. Every town had their own. In the 1980s I worked for Beacon Communications in Acton, which published 13 weekly town papers, all with unique content specific to their town every week. In the 1990s I read both the Pepperell and the Townsend papers, which were published by Nashoba Publications, the same company that put out the daily Lowell Sun.

When I started my small press in 2007, for marketing aides I developed my own databases of local bookstores and local newspapers. There were still hundreds of individual town papers, although by that time, they had been gathered up by several media companies and were becoming much more homogeneous and generalized in content. They still existed as separate entities, though, with their original names, covering local news and events.

Now almost none of those weeklies still exists. Some of them were replaced by regional publications (such as the Nashoba Valley Voice), heavy on advertizing and carrying a lot of generic national news from various wire service feeds (the way the Gardner News now does). But in many cases, nothing replaced the local town paper at all. There is no local source of news. People post gossip, innuendo and hyperbole on town Facebook pages and that's about the only way people learn about their communities.

I'm not sure I know myself what I want for news, apart from the stuff I write--if I hadn't snatched the Courier a split second away from the jaws of oblivion, what would I want to see in it? I certainly read it; I was a subscriber until Stonebridge stopped the presses.

I like a local paper to have local news, and leave out the national wire service stuff. I read three big city dailies; I get all of that news I can stomach. And I don't want to know just about Town Hall. I'd like to know about the fires, the car accidents, the broken window on Central Street, what was going on with all those sirens at 2:00 a.m. I'd like to know what's going on when somebody is building a new building or tearing one down.

Weekly papers used to have announcements of weddings, engagements and births, along with obituaries. They used to have little columns of all the real estate transactions in town. I miss those. I'm still trying to figure out where to get that information. And in those days when people seemed to be so much less paranoid, you could read every jot and tittle about what happened in the school department. If there was a nice juicy labor dispute or inter-office uproar at Town Hall, we all lapped up the stories like candy.

I'm thinking about all this because I have become so tired of mainstream news--I'm sick of reading about COVID, I'm sick of endless articles about vaccinations, I'm sick of rambles about what and who is or is not opening...I'm just sick of it. Because none of it has any substance. It's just endless filler, endless bait to keep people reading.

Everything in the Courier is stuff that directly affects your life, whether you're interested in reading about it or not. You may disagree with what I publish, you may think I should be publishing more or saying it differently or not publishing it. But if you live here in Winchendon, it all has relevance to you. Even the items on the Region page comprise news from your elected officials and events you can participate in. In most cases, the Courier talks about stuff that you pay for, with your taxes, whether it's important to you or not.

And that, to me, is what "local journalism" means. I'm never going to win a Pulitzer--heck, I will never win any award of any kind. I'm too much of an iconoclast. But common knowledge and common experience are what knit a community together. Without those, we're not a town, we're just a lot of houses, with people inside glued to their phones or YouTube or Facebook, everyone living in their own little world.

Which is, of course, exactly what a lot of places have become. And that's why I keep on doing this.

Inanna Arthen