By: Jerry Carton, former reporter/columnist at the Winchendon Courier, Winchendon, MA

September 2, 2021

I can’t begin to tell you how often a parent, usually but not always, the mom, would ask me how they could get more copies of a given week’s Courier.

These questions would invariably come after I’d mentioned their kid in a story about softball or track or a musical or student council or whatever.  It was guaranteed to happen after I’d write a feature story on a specific student, which I did pretty much on a weekly basis for a lot of years.  Off the top of my head, I can think of several athletes, a baseball player, a softball player, and a cheerleader, whom I wrote about when they were in high school and wrote about again when they themselves became coaches (Greg, Shannon, Ashley) and their parents STILL wanted extra copies.  Of course they did. What parent wouldn’t?

All this is a semi-long way of getting around to mentioning the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, for which, gasp, bi-partisan support appears to be growing in Congress. The LJSA would offer a variety of tax incentives for individuals to subscribe to digital local papers, or to donate to local media outlets, and to newspapers for hiring local journalists and legitimately covering schools and zoning boards and conservation committees, etc.

The demise of the actual Winchendon Courier, along with the demise of literally thousands of small papers like we were, to say nothing of the alarming reduction even of major big city dailies, is well-documented.  Papers like ours served as much more than repositories for fluffy features. We served as the guardrail against misuse of the public trust.  Without local papers like the Courier, or all those thousands of similar papers, how would residents really know what the hell their elected or appointed officials were doing with their tax dollars?

I’m obviously not suggesting that without a local paper, local officials are automatically going to break laws and rules, of course not, but the absence of coverage  invariably leads to increased skepticism, cynicism, and a significantly less informed electorate and that’s not good for democracy.

We, all of us, need our small papers.  The Globe isn’t coming to north-central Massachusetts to cover Board of Selectmen meetings in Winchendon or Athol.  The Times isn’t going to send reporters to cover a school board meeting in East Williston.  Even where papers are surviving, take our neighboring Gardner News, many, including TGN, are on life support, skeletal shells of what they once were and their communities are lesser for that.  You certainly can’t have rational discussions of local issues on social media.

Passage of the LJSA isn’t a panacea.  It’s not going to “save” local journalism.  But any efforts to salvage whatever we can for small papers is worth cheering.