An Editorial by Ken Harwood

This is NOT good news.

To be honest, I am not a fan of the current owner Gannett for the same reason I fear the takeover. The new profit margin is found in eliminating the editors and journalistic reporters in favor of more cost effective and far more productive writer -- lots of brief stories, cool pictures, and click bait to the next story. Gannett is guilty and Digital First has turned this into an art form.

Our newspapers are dying and this is a very very bad thing. If we do not have reporters in the council chamber and at plan commission meetings we allow the system to act in darkness. Without detailed, fact checked, unbiased reporting we allow e-media to manufacture the story. If we do not have reporters providing actual researched information we get just the headlines. Like Facebook. Twitter, and Youtube those who make the most NOISE win. We have a president who won an election because of his Q score and ability to own the headlines - not his policy. We have debates taking place on twitter. We have the most partisan politics in history. We have problems that if we all spent just fifty cents a day would go away.

But Ken, you say, YOU are an e-media guy, none of your work is in print, you work from the headlines, and we read you -- so we are safe. Wrong wrong wrong, I am a blogger that aggregates stories you might not otherwise see, I comment to encourage you to think about making good decisions and changes to policy that could be made to improve the system. I read the details and bring the expertise of many to the light of day - But I rely on reporters to get the facts in front of us all so we can make the informed decisions that I advocate for. When we do not know the whole story we make uninformed decisions, wrong decisions, bad decisions. This I see every day! Special interests delaying or eliminating great projects, no developers agreement in place, Council persons who do not understand business making bad decisions, businesses blowing smoke up the butts of Council persons, legislators responding to lobbyists and contributions, and executives in and out of government doing more than I have space to talk about. We need to actually dig out the story and the number of reporters that can do this are exponentially diminishing.

The company, Digital First, making the offer to Gannett has a track record of getting rid of editors and reporters and replacing them with content writers and then they market the content on multiple platforms. It is fun to read just like the tweets of our President, fun to read but lacks the journalistic depth of the real story or real understanding of the issue.

The majority of people get their news and information from the internet. Anyone can publish there for free. We read far more stories with far less detail, In fact most of my readers will NOT be reading this sentence as it is too far down in the story.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. Thomas Jefferson

A community, not government, not a big corporation, but the people should own their newspaper... Ken Harwood