Your newspaper is the historical record for community memories

If nobody reads newspapers anymore, who were all these people? Here’s another question. Can you name another business in your town that interacts with that many people every single day? Not every week. Not when they’re running a promotion. Every day. I’m not sure there are many.”

Bryan Chester, 2026 MPA President

Every so often, someone will say to me, “nobody reads newspapers anymore.” I usually just roll my eyes and move on. But a few weeks ago, I had an experience that made me wish those people had been sitting in our circulation office. We had a press issue overnight and couldn’t start printing until almost 10 in the morning. By the time we got the paper on the press, we already knew we had missed our normal delivery window.

Then the phones started ringing … and they didn’t stop.

Hundreds of people called asking where their paper was. Some were patient, some weren’t. One subscriber informed us that we had completely ruined his morning, which, if I’m being honest, I appreciated. It told me we were still part of his routine, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony.

If nobody reads newspapers anymore, who were all these people? Here’s another question. Can you name another business in your town that interacts with that many people every single day? Not every week. Not when they’re running a promotion. Every day. I’m not sure there are many.

The funny thing is, we’ve accepted this narrative that newspapers aren’t relevant anymore, even though the evidence is all around us. When Mizzou pulls off a big upset, we sell out of newspapers. When a local high school wins a state championship, people don’t just read the story online, they want the newspaper. They want to save it. They want to show it to their kids years from now.

But why?

Because a newspaper does something a Facebook post never will. It becomes part of the historical record. Sure, the game happened whether we covered it or not. The championship was still won. But without a local newspaper, those moments belong only to the people who happened to be there. Our job is to make them belong to the whole community.

That’s true whether it’s a football game, a devastating tornado, a contentious school board meeting or the opening of a new small business. We take thousands of individual moments and turn them into a shared story about our community.

Maybe that’s where we’ve fallen short. We’ve spent so much time defending newspapers that we’ve forgotten to explain what newspapers actually do. Most people don’t see the reporter chasing one more source before deadline.

They don’t see the advertising representative helping a local business figure out how to reach customers.

They don’t see the carrier throwing papers before sunrise or the press crew trying to solve a mechanical problem while the clock keeps ticking.

They just see the finished product, until they don’t. Then suddenly our phones ring off the hook. People don’t complain about things they don’t care about. I think that’s something all of us in this industry should remember.

Our communities still expect us to show up, be it daily or weekly. They still count on us to chronicle the moments that matter. They still trust us to preserve the first draft of their town’s history.

That’s a pretty remarkable thing in 2026, and something worth talking about, especially as unexpected closures put greater stress on the industry.