When most people think of newspapers, they think of national publications, like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Any newspaper is crucial to telling stories, especially with the state of the world today with issues in politics, climate change and immigration.
While larger newspapers are important for keeping up with national and global news, people don’t realize how important local newspapers are for them and where they live.
National stories can have an effect on people in some ways, but it is mostly something people read and can forget about, because it’s not happening where they live.
Local newspapers can be government watchdogs, cover city events and produce time sensitive stories.
Unfortunately, there has been a decline in local newspapers in recent years, usually because of lack of funding to support the newspaper printing and journalist salaries. It means a decline in jobs for journalists but also a decline in information for the audience.
Next week marks the beginning of National Newspaper Week, which is meant to show appreciation for all newspapers. For the week of Oct. 6-12, I want to show appreciation for The Post staff.
The Post is unique in its own way as an independent student newspaper in Athens. We are editorially independent, which means we are pitching our own ideas, researching, writing, editing and designing everything on our own time.
For most college students, their day is done after classes. At The Post, our staff is in the newsroom after class every day and, for most days, longer than we would like to be. Everything we do is done in our own free time, which can be hard to balance with the requirements of classes and obligation to get things done on time for print and online deadlines.
Even though it sometimes takes up too much of our free time, we still love to do it. Majority of our staff voluntarily contributes their free time to write stories, take photos and design. Our paid staffers aren’t paid as much as we would like, but we still love the jobs we do.
With our limited time as college students, we try to cover as much as we can. Every week we do local and campus government, breaking news and events happening on campus and in the city.
As students, we do what we can to inform the majority of our audience: Ohio University students. We do what we can to cover as much as possible to keep students informed and are working to expand our coverage even more.
I appreciate every staff member, both paid and unpaid, for doing everything they can to do the best work they can do.
Between The Post and all other publications at the university and the city, we keep students, alumni, parents and locals aware of what’s going on in Athens and at the university.
It is something that a national newspaper can not do and need to continue to have the support of our audience to keep local journalism alive.
Ellen Wagner is a senior studying journalism at Ohio University and the editor-in-chief of The Post. Have questions? Email Ellen at ew047615@ohio.edu or tweet her @ewagner19.
