Bringing the Newspaper Home

THE CATSKILLS - For a long time, we did what everyone else did. We published our work on platforms we didn’t own. We sent readers through channels we didn’t control. We learned how the feeds worked, adjusted to the algorithms, and tried to make sure people could find us.

For a while, that worked pretty well.

Then, little by little, we started to realize how much of our relationship with the community had ended up in somebody else’s hands.

We weren’t just using outside platforms to share our work. We were depending on them for distribution, discovery, identity, and even memory. If an algorithm changed, fewer people heard from us. If a platform changed its rules, we had to change with it. Years of local history could become difficult to find simply because something somewhere had decided it wasn’t interesting anymore.

That didn’t seem like a very good foundation for a local newspaper.

I’ve written before about resilience. To me, resilience isn’t just having a plan to rebuild after something goes wrong. It’s also about asking why something important was so easy to lose in the first place.

That question has shaped a lot of what we’ve been building.

We’re not re-branding the newspaper or trying to turn it into something fashionable. We’re doing something much simpler. We’re bringing more of the relationship between the newspaper and the community home.

That means publishing on a domain we control, operating our own infrastructure, keeping our own records, and building direct relationships with readers, businesses, organizations, contributors, and communities.

In other words, we’re trying to own the things we’re responsible for.

A local newspaper has always been more than a collection of articles. It’s part of the infrastructure of a community.

People use it to find out what happened at the town meeting, when the fundraiser is, who opened a new business, who died, what the school is doing, where help is needed, and what their neighbors are talking about. Over time, all of those little pieces become something larger. They become a record of a place.

Global platforms can be useful for spreading that information, and we’ll continue to use them. We just don’t think they should be the place where the community’s memory lives.

They weren’t built for that.

They’re built to handle enormous amounts of information from enormous numbers of people. Local context is easy to lose at that scale. What matters deeply in Gilboa, Stamford, Windham, Middleburgh, or Margaretville may mean almost nothing to an algorithm looking at the whole world.

It matters here, though.

That’s why we’ve been building a place capable of remembering it.

When you subscribe here, you’re not just paying for access to articles. You’re establishing a direct relationship with a local institution. We know where the responsibility for that relationship lives because it lives here with us.

The same idea applies to the information you entrust to us. We don’t need to build elaborate profiles of readers so we can sell their attention to somebody else. We need enough information to provide the services people have asked us to provide.

That’s a much simpler relationship.

Hopefully, much of what we’re building will eventually feel ordinary.

There should be an archive where old newspapers can still be found years from now. There should be a community calendar that actually reflects the community. Businesses and organizations should have permanent pages where people can find them. Articles should remain connected to the people, places, and groups they’re about.

None of that is especially flashy.

That’s kind of the point.

We want things that are useful enough to become boring. Things you can count on being there.

The same thinking is changing how we work with local businesses and organizations.

An advertiser isn’t an impression to us. It’s a hardware store, an insurance agency, a restaurant, a farm, a nonprofit, a school, a volunteer organization, or somebody working out of a truck trying to build a business.

Their relationship with the community shouldn’t disappear when an advertising campaign ends.

So print advertising can now connect to permanent digital profiles. Those profiles can connect to events, announcements, articles, locations, and other parts of the community. Over time, those connections create something much more useful than a collection of ads.

They create context.

There’s a larger idea behind all of this, although we don’t need to make it complicated.

Trust is built over time.

People learn who you are by watching what you do. A business earns a reputation by serving customers. A reporter earns trust by doing good work. An organization becomes part of a community by showing up. None of those things can really be established by declaring them.

They have to be lived.

A local system can remember those relationships in ways that a global feed usually can’t. An article connects to an author. The author connects to an organization. An event connects to a town. A business connects to the people it serves. Each new piece adds a little more context to everything already there.

Eventually, what you have isn’t really a website.

It’s a living record of a community.

That’s what we’re trying to build.

We’ll still use Facebook. We’ll still use search engines. We’ll still share stories wherever people happen to be.

We just won’t confuse those places with home.

We’re not trying to win the internet.

We’re trying to take good care of our little corner of it.

And hopefully, years from now, much of what we’re building today will still be here, quietly doing its job.