If you believe as we do that small local newspapers, owned and written by people who live in and love their community, provide an essential foundation for that community’s sense of neighborhood, then you’ll agree with the thoughts that our editor, Joyce Coronel, presented so eloquently in our last issue.
Joyce’s notion is that, to help sustain and preserve the community values of its citizens, a local newspaper must recognize the role it plays in that pursuit and reliably demonstrate its unswerving commitment to uphold and celebrate those values.
That, Joyce believes, is what this newspaper has done throughout its nearly 30 years of existence.
From declining marijuana dispensary and other advertising that seems to contradict our neighborhoods’ predominant values, by rejecting language and illustrations that we think most readers would find offensive, by going out of our way to publish stories of achievement and success—this is what we do on an almost everyday basis.
In other words, as we have said many times, we aren’t looking under rocks for headline-grabbing sensationalism.
Yes, such publications have come along during our three decades of existence. Their stories often are designed to enflame emotions and lead advertisers to think that shock tactics will produce increased readership.
So guess what: It isn’t so.
Unfortunately, the subsequent failure of this type of “journalism” has caused some small-business owners to tell us that “print doesn’t work.” Print does work, which we find over and over again in some of the small, truly neighborhood-focused newspapers around our state, the Arcadia News, the Superior Sun, the Copper Basin News among them.
The other downside to the periodic appearance of seemingly community-friendly newspapers that are focused exclusively on how much advertising revenue they can generate is that they often rely on predatory pricing and multi-publication “bargains” that don’t attract readership and thus don’t produce results. It’s one more justification for locally owned businesses to ascribe to the conundrum that “print doesn’t work.”
Again, we don’t use any of those deceptive practices. Nor, in recent years, have we had to.
With the exception of a few, particularly small businesses that have been hurt at some previous time by slash-and-burn sales tactics, we have been fortunate in our Kyrene Corridor neighborhoods to have avoided these kinds of quick-buck-and-depart entrepreneurs.
But, as we’ve heard, the sting of times gone by can create a lasting aura of distrust, which raises yet one more obstacle to our ability to generate the amount of revenue, small as it is, to keep bringing you, and our community, the kind of local newspaper that we want to produce and you want to read.
Moral to this story: If you like what you receive in your driveway every other Saturday throughout the year, if you agree with the concept of a newspaper produced with community values as being integral to its philosophy and, of course, if you agree with what Joyce Coronel, our editor, had to say about our number-one goal, helping to sustain and preserve a sense of neighborhood, please tell your favorite providers of quality goods and services about Wrangler News.
Your support—and theirs, through even a few advertising dollars—will help keep us viable over the decades that await. And, of course, help convince small-business owners, like us, that print—and those who pursue it as a passion, not simply as a means to satisfy a corporation’s predetermined financial goals—really does work.
