My wife and I returned to New Hampshire to live after an absence of eight years, during which we lived near family in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
We loved the diversity of Ann Arbor and the cultural opportunities offered in nearby Detroit and the southeastern part of Michigan. All the while, we missed New Hampshire and the Concord area, and knew that someday we would return to the place we had called home for nearly a half-century.
One aspect of life in Ann Arbor, a city slightly larger than Manchester (there the similarity ends), was its lack of a daily newspaper available in a print version so that we could hold it in our hands each morning. The Ann Arbor News had folded during the Great Recession in 2009 and what was left was a Newhouse-owned chain of papers throughout what we called “lower Michigan,” including a new incarnation of the Ann Arbor News.
It was, and is, available for home delivery in the area on Thursdays and Sundays only. Seven days a week, you could read a few stories of local interest online through a website called mlive.com. The site also carried online-only versions of the several other papers in Michigan under the same ownership.
The result of this surviving entity was most unsatisfying for those readers thirsting for local and area news.
In addition, Detroit’s two surviving newspapers, the venerable Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, although printed seven days a week, were available for home delivery in Ann Arbor only three days a week, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays.
The Free Press reflected a liberal editorial policy, while the News was editorially slanted to the conservative taste. At least both papers presented robust editorial viewpoints in their opinion pages.
The Free Press won nationwide awards for a weeklong in-depth series in 2014 on charter schools in Michigan, pointing to the lack of oversight and accountability, and the record of poor performance produced by many charters.
For someone used to reading the print versions of three area papers – the Concord Monitor, New Hampshire Union Leader, and the Boston Globe – it was shocking to be reduced to a journalistic wasteland in a sizable and highly educated urban area. For local news on most days, we were limited to the chance that there might be an Ann Arbor story on one of the Detroit TV stations or online at the mlive.com or Detroit newspaper sites.
It is not a prescription for inviting engagement or dialogue about community issues.
Almost before the moving truck had emptied our belongings in so many boxes and plastic tubs, we were anxious to see how the Monitor was doing in this challenging environment.
We knew it had to be hurting, as are all newspapers, but we were so relieved to see that it still arrives in our driveway every morning. It may be a little thin, and there is obviously an early evening deadline before the paper goes to print, but we have a daily paper every morning at breakfast. It has local stories and a local opinion page filled with guest columns and letters to the editor. It is an institution that pulls the community together.
One thing we do miss above other sacrifices imposed by recession, a pandemic, and the lure of Facebook and Twitter is a strong and regular editorial voice. We and other readers may agree or disagree with newspaper editorials, but we know the positions they take on public issues are carefully considered. Most of all, editorials invite local dialogue. They make us think. They help to foster a sense of community.
Thus I hope the editors of the Concord Monitor will reconsider whatever led them to the decision not to offer their editorial viewpoints. Editorials are an important part of a robust journalistic tradition, one that is a positive contribution to any community.
(Richard W. Osborne lives in Contoocook.)