We lived in Chicago during the era when the city had two great newspapers. The Chicago Tribune was published in the morning and the Chicago Sun Times was an afternoon newspaper. We moved to Chicago when we had been married for just one year and our finances were tight. We had to pay attention to each expenditure. One of the luxuries of that phase of our life was Sunday morning when I would often get up early and walk down to the corner newsstand and purchase a copy of the Sunday Tribune. The newspaper would last us all week with its extensive coverage of local and international news, color comics, book reviews, and a features magazine. When there was a major event in the news we might purchase a copy of one of the newspapers’ daily editions, but that wasn’t a frequent occurrence for us.

When we graduated from seminary and moved to North Dakota one of the things I did was to subscribe to the local weekly newspaper and as soon as we felt we were able we subscribed to the Bismarck Tribune, a daily newspaper that was published in the State Capitol, 150 miles away. The luxury of a daily newspaper was something that we took for granted for the next few decades, switching to the Idaho Statesman when we moved to Boise and the Rapid City Journal when we moved to that place.

During our years in Idaho, I started to do a bit of part-time work for two weekly newspapers, The Kuna-Melba News and the Meridian Standard. After setting up the database of subscribers and printing the mailing labels for quite a while, I began to do a bit of page layout and ad design. When the owner and editor of the papers became seriously ill, I took over a host of other duties and I served as editor and publisher for a few weeks after her death until her family found a customer and sold the newspapers. I helped with the transition to the new owners, but didn’t continue the part-time position after that.

There were columnists who I followed, and news that I felt was important for me to know as a pastor. I remember once saying to someone that I would always receive a daily newspaper because I needed to have the obituaries of those in my congregation who died. When we moved to South Dakota our neighborhood had matching mailboxes that had a box for US mail and a box for the daily newspaper on the same matching posts in each yard.

Over the years, however, we noticed that the newspaper mailboxes started to disappear from our neighborhood. I started to get more and more information from the Internet. At some point, I found that funeral home websites were a better source for obituaries than newspapers. The newspapers began to charge to print obituaries and people began to put shortened versions in the paper while having a more extensive obituary on the Internet. The Internet provided me with the obituaries much quicker than the newspaper giving me more time to prepare eulogies.

Then one year we suspended newspaper delivery during a vacation and never restarted our subscription. For some time we had been able to access the entire print edition online and I found we no longer needed to have all of that paper pile up in our house for a weekly trip to a recycling center.

Over the years, I observed the decline of newspapers. As more and more newspapers went online, i began to read online versions of the New York Times, Washington Post, The Portland Oregonian, and the Seattle Times. I’d check out other newspapers as well. Then newspapers erected paywalls and I decided not to spend the money subscribing to online editions. National Public Radio news, BBC news, and CBC news were all available without paying and became my go-to news sources, supplemented by local news sources.

When we found our home here in Birch Bay and moved in, we began to receive a weekly local newspaper once again. We didn’t subscribe. We just started to receive the Northern Light in our mailbox each week. After a bit of investigation, I found that the newspaper had come up with a very different approach to economic survival in an era of failing newspapers. Instead of continuing to raise subscription fees with the accompanying loss of subscribers as economic pressures mounted, the Northern Light decided to drop subscription fees entirely. They began to mail the paper to every residence in their service area without charge. This meant that their readership far exceeded any other small town weekly newspapers. With larger circulation came larger fees for advertisers. The increased circulation also helped the newspaper to attract some pretty good writers.

Recently our small town paper received 43 awards at the annual Washington Newspaper Publishers Association’s 2023 Better Newspaper Contest at the state conference. Awards were received for Community Service, General Excellence, Advertising, Special Sections, and Lifestyle. Eleven different writers received recognition for their contributions to the newspaper.

I’ve learned to look forward to Thursdays when our paper arrives and most weeks I read everything except a few ads and legal notices. I usually even scan the police reports, not because I need the news, but because it makes me feel pretty good to live in a place with so few police calls, most of which are not in regards to serious crimes.

I realize that I am old school, a fan or radio and newspapers in part because they are so much a part of my past. But I have also noticed that our son, who lives just outside of the coverage area of the Northern Light, picks up and reads the paper most weeks when he stops by our home for a visit. Both he and we point out articles in the paper to our grandchildren who are also starting to pick up the paper without being prompted.

I don’t know what the future will hold. The Northern Light has a good website in addition to the print edition and articles often appear on the web site before the paper reaches our mailbox. You can also get the solution to the crossword puzzle from the website without waiting for the next weeks’ paper. But I almost never visit their website. I appreciate the print edition and the pacing of a good high quality small-town weekly paper. I hope the publishers will continue to figure out how to bring it to us each week for years to come.