Carisa Corrow of Penacook is co-author of “126 Falsehoods We Believe About Education” and founder of Educating for Good.
When I was little, I can remember sitting on my grandfather’s knee at the kitchen table eating saltines and sardines while he talked me through the funny pages printed in the Concord Monitor.
His favorite was Family Circus. I rarely got the jokes, but chuckled alongside him nonetheless. While I lost the love of sardines, I have never wavered in my affection for the newspaper or learning to read it.
Last year, there was a call to serve on the Monitor’s very first Reader Advisory Board. I jumped at the opportunity to apply, and am proud to have been part of the process. While I certainly shared my opinions each month through in-person meetings and our running log of notes, I definitely took more away from the process than I gave. I learned so much about the history of the paper, the printing press and the Monitor’s future goals for reporting.
As my year winds down and the second class of the Reader Advisory Board starts the process, I thought I’d share my biggest takeaway, investment.
Investing in the Concord Monitor is investing in our community, and investing doesn’t always involve money. Yes, we must support local journalism through our dollars, but also through our own submissions and sharing story ideas that are meaningful to us.
Please invest by sharing your opinions through opinion writing. While we can certainly learn a lot from the news articles, the Letters to the Editor and My Turns help us understand the varying ideas and perspectives in our community. Sometimes I don’t realize I should have an opinion on a particular issue, or that an issue even existed until I read the opinions of my neighbors. While I still take a look at the funny pages now and then, this is often the page I turn to first.
Investing also means taking time to share story ideas. Funding has changed drastically for journalism in recent years, which has meant fewer reporters. While the Concord Monitor is slowly adding back reporters in part due to programs like Report for America, they need our eyes and ears on the ground. What stories should they be covering? Who should the community know about? What issues are important to report on short term and long term? They will not get to all the stories, but I’ve found the staff is very interested in knowing what’s important to our community.
And of course, investing means subscribing. Local journalism, like the Monitor, relies heavily on the community for its survival. Big news outlets are not going to cover the everyday, local issues impacting Capital area citizens. Unless something salacious happens, they aren’t going to report on our local government meetings, the impact of a new state law, or our school sports team. The Concord Monitor does and subscriptions help them do it.
The internet has changed funding for local newspapers quite a bit as everything can be digitized. No longer do most folks need a physical paper to get information, but honestly, the paper has always been more than the final printed version. A newspaper is the people that write the story, that research and check sources. It’s the photographer who captures moments in time, the editors who decide what to share where and when.
A newspaper is a reflection of the community it serves, and requires community support to survive. So, gift a subscription this holiday, share those opinions, and don’t be shy about sharing story ideas that are important to you… to us.
I want to thank the Concord Monitor editors and staff for the amazing opportunity to serve on the first Reader Advisory Board. It was a great learning experience. Good luck to next year’s board!