What’s the 422?

Our intention in launching this site has been to provide some form of news coverage to places that haven’t been receiving enough of it. Trappe, Spring City, and the Perkiomen Valley School District, to name a few places, hadn’t seen many reporters at their recent meetings until we started showing up last month. Other news beats that deserve full-time coverage are only receiving part-time coverage. The reasons for this are complex, but they mostly boil down to the various troubles faced by the newspaper industry.

Revenues have been steadily declining for a decade as advertisers and readers have migrated to the Internet. In response, most newspapers launched Web sites, some better than others. Unfortunately, the revenue generated by those sites doesn’t come close to replacing what’s been lost from the printed editions of the newspapers. In some cases, the sites haven’t even managed to pay for themselves. Meanwhile, the print revenues continue to dry up, forcing the newspaper companies to cut staff and coverage. The people who suffer most obviously are the people who work at the newspapers, but you, the readers, also suffer.

You suffer because you’re not receiving the same amount of information about your community that your parents did. More crucially, you suffer because when there are not enough journalists to watch businesses and elected officials closely, they have greater freedom to do things they are not supposed to do. If newspapers vanish from our national landscape, the jubilee will be upon those who seek to enrich themselves at the expense of the public and in defiance of the law.

That is why we are not pleased to learn about the desperate days that have come to the Philadelphia Inquirer and to the Journal Register Company, which owns the Pottstown Mercury, the Norristown Times-Herald, and Montgomery Newspapers (publishers of the Spring-Ford Reporter and the Valley Item).

We often link to their stories, because even in their weakened conditions, they can put more shoes on the ground than a tiny group of volunteers doing journalism in between their day jobs. They are not our “competition.” They are the giant, old, cracking dam holding back a flood of ignorance and the willful secrecy of those who would prefer that you not pay any attention to the decisions that affect you. When we cover things they don’t, we are, at best, mortar for some of those cracks. The fact that we’re trying to help patch the cracks should make it obvious that we’re not looking forward to a day when the dam is gone.