White-out a reminder to keep community conversations going

I view our newspaper as a community-wide conversation that never ends. We rely on what we hear from the community for everything we send out weekly. More than 200 Minnesota newspapers are printing white front pages this week to show what the community would miss if they didn’t have that conversation.

Fifteen years ago, predictions were made that newspapers would be wiped out by the internet in a matter of months, but small town weeklies are proving to be just as important as ever because people realize they can’t get that same conversation anywhere else.

Here’s an example: in my first year at the Staples World, I had a conversation with a local citizen who told me “I don’t read the newspaper because I know everything in it before it comes out.”

I found that interesting, because I didn’t see him at the city council and EDA meetings I had been to, or the school board meetings and community events. He may have been at some of the sporting events, but certainly not all of the games we covered. He wasn’t sitting in the living room of the couple I had interviewed about their 60th wedding anniversary, and hadn’t been at the fire department training or in the school classrooms where I took photos of what our kids are learning.

But I didn’t challenge his statement, I just figured he didn’t want to know what he was missing. Later in the conversation, he told me about his Arabian horses and how he wanted to cross them with a percheron, to create a turbo friesian (that’s a real thing, I looked it up later). Only he didn’t know of any percheron horses in the area.

So I asked him “What about the award-winning percherons we did a story on a few weeks ago?” 

He hadn’t heard about that. The very thing he had been searching for the most was right there in the publication he thought he didn’t need. I’m not sure the irony hit him as hard as it hit me.

I have had many microcosms of that conversation since then, when people miss out on what they want to know, even though it was printed in the newspaper the week before. Often I will hear someone say they wish something had been said publicly about a topic, when we had a big story in the newspaper that same month.

This is a very active community, people do amazing things here every week. We aren’t able to cover everything, but we do our best to get the stories that we feel are most important to the general public. We also try to keep it a professional publication, meaning we remain as truthful and as objective as we can.

We rely on the community for all of our stories, so the white front page this week represents something that we would like you to help us fill. I mean that literally, you can take that front page, write the stories you would like to see, draw or paste the photos you would like to publish and let us know that this is your front page and you want to engage in the community conversation. Send us a photo of your front page or drop it off at our office. We are always looking for story ideas and the local people are the only source we have.