Putting the 'local' back into your local paper

When Brenda Tischer wrote and thanked us for "putting the 'local' back into the local paper,"

I thought to myself: "Phew, she gets it.

Our Facebook readers get it.

The people I see at the store, at the boys soccer banquet, at the playoff football game and all the folks Pete ran into at church get it, too.

The Pine Knot News is here because our communities - Cloquet, Esko, Carlton, Cromwell, Wright, Wrenshall - need a paper that will be here in good and bad times. We need a quality paper that cares enough to keep an office in town. And we need a paper that understands we live here in Carlton County because we choose to - not because there isn't enough room in Duluth.

We've had a few who questioned our sanity for starting a newspaper. After all, papers around the nation are failing, cutting staff or shutting down completely.

But here's what I say to that: Not every newspaper is failing. There are plenty of locally owned, community newspapers that are making it because the people who live there know the value of local news, and they support their local newspaper in many ways.

Please support us by subscribing in print or online, reading us, emailing or dropping off your news and photos, calling or coming by with story ideas, telling us when you have complaints or issues with things we've done - in short, making the Pine Knot News part of your family.

It's funny. People often love to hate their local newspaper, just like siblings who might argue and fight over everything, from who gets to ride shotgun to who's wearing whose shirt. But when someone threatens that brother, watch out.

I started my newspaper career in Austin, Minn. where people didn't exactly love their local paper following the Hormel strike. In fact, as a relative newcomer, I thought the Austin Daily Herald would likely fail when a much bigger paper - the Rochester Post Bulletin - moved into town. Boy, was I wrong.

The Post Bulletin opened a news bureau in town and offered an "Austin edition" of the daily paper, which appeared to include almost all of the news already running in the Post Bulletin, except they filled the cover of the news and sports sections with news about Austin events, meetings and sports, so it looked at first glance like an Austin paper.

But the Bohunks and the Swedes and the Mexicans and all those people who chose to settle in Austin 10 or 100 years ago - they didn't much like the idea of Big Brother moving in. And they kept supporting their hometown paper, with some even subscribing to both. After at least a decade, Rochester finally closed up the Austin bureau a few years ago.

Here we've done the reverse. Started a hometown paper when the company that owned the existing paper kept consolidating services and pulling local resources out of the community until it finally moved the local office to Duluth.

That won't happen with the Pine Knot News, we promise.

If all of you folks who are reading this second free issue of your new hometown paper will support us, we will support you. We are here to stay.

Because we choose to live here, and we chose to start this newspaper.