•February 5, 2020•
By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

According to a late 2019 piece in the New York Times, one in five newspapers in America has been shuttered over the past 15 years, and journalist numbers cut in half. This bodes ill for the vibrancy of communities, for which newspapers have been the essential glue, prod and town crier.
We must stop wringing our hands and instead devise alternatives, just as news in paper form in the 18th century replaced the news shouted out earlier by the town criers.
My dad ran the Stark County News in Toulon post-World War II. As a teen in the 1950s, I sat at the huge keyboard of a Model 14 Linotype, a balky iron and steel beast that spit out lines of type from molten lead. It was high tech!
On Wednesday afternoons, townsfolk crowded, literally, the corridor of the post office, waiting impatiently for Billy Humphrey to stuff the new edition into their mailboxes. The paper included one or two pages of “personals,” of “Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Jackson spending the weekend in Mahomet with Mrs. Jackson’s parents. They all enjoyed dinner in Champaign Saturday evening.” Personals were the Facebook of 70 years ago.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.