October starts a new year for newspapers across the country.

October 2nd to 8th is National Newspaper Week. We post our annual statement of ownership and declare that we have made it another year. That may be something that is hard to understand for some people, particularly the youngest of our readers. Our oldest and longest readers can’t imagine a day or a time without a newspaper. Imagine what that might be like.

No place or business recording the milestones of your life. Nowhere to find school news, civic news, traffic accidents or obituaries. Oh, you might say “I can find it online,” but that would be ignoring the fact that almost all local news is originally crafted and created in a newspaper editorial department.

Almost all photographs online are taken by staff photographers or stringers from the newspapers. Wedding announcements, engagements, reunions and birthdays can all be found in our pages, but nowhere else.

You also find legal notices, police reports, court reports and real estate transactions of record in the pages of local newspapers and nowhere else. If we aren’t here a year from now to mark another anniversary of publishing, what will you have? No stories or photos from the high school ball games. No sports reports on golf, tennis, cross country, track, wrestling and swimming. There would be no photos of the homecoming courts or the casts of the school plays.

The new term created for this is a “news desert” — an area void of legitimate, professional news coverage. You may have a wild and crazy site that only promotes the news they want you to have with their version of right and wrong and possibly a website controlled by elected officials, which would be as impartial as one of the political national conventions.

We have our faults for sure, but no one has ever come close to a better alternative. Newspapers remain the most trusted and reliable source of local news. We are proud and pleased to be the local newspaper and your source of history in this community. Cheers to another year of news.

— RV