the editor talks with you

This happened twice within the last year. Chapin and St. Matthews lost their local newspapers. The families that owned them felt lost advertising revenue made it no longer practical to publish them.

Former Chapin Mayor Stan Shealy, a long-time journalist whose wife Vicki was one of our editors for many years, started an online newspaper, The Chapin News, to fill the void. But he is still troubled by the closing of The Chapin Times.

“Nothing can replace the value a local newspaper offers,” he wrote. “Nowhere can you find articles in print that you want to share or save as keepsakes.

“The Chapin Times was important since the 1980s in providing news and information to those who had made Chapin their home for most of their lives, as well as the many who have moved to Chapin from every state in the union and made this place their home. Dee and Bud Timmons are sorely missed in this community, especially by myself, one who has grown up as a reader and as a former newspaper reporter.”

Despite Stan’s nostalgia for the Chap-in Times and newspapers in general, the question we should ask is if local newspapers really have value and, of so, what is it.

Many of the weekly newspapers I see in our travels around the country do little local journalism. You will find in them accounts of school news provided by school officials, dates and times of public meetings but little if any accounts of what goes on at those meetings or the decisions local and school officials make that affect taxes, public safety, your child’s education, the quality of your life and other vital matters.

Such reporting is expensive. It requires human beings. Artificial intelligence and robotics cannot do this kind of work yet.

Is such reporting truly important to you?

Newspaper owners brought much of this on themselves. They did not react as radio station owners did and embrace TV and add it to their inventory of methods to serve their communities – at a profit.

Never forget profit. Without it, local newspaper people lose their independence and ability to serve as your watchdogs.

Newspapers sat back in the 1990s and early 2000s and wondered how they could harness the power of the internet to preserve their independent roles.

They watched Amazon, Google, Craigslist, TripAdvisor and others provide services that had once been theirs exclusively.

At the Chronicle we have gone from 15 employees to 5. Due to dwindling revenue we have had to supplement what 15 people once did with contractors and freelancers.

I think we still publish one of the best local newspapers in the state but it takes greater effort than ever to do it.

I like to think our coverage of such issues as the failure of a $9 billion nuclear reactor project and the $2 billion it cost local ratepayers is important to you.

So is the future of taxpayer-owned San-tee Cooper, a major source of electricity for Mid-Carolina members. Or our coverage of the poor job the state is doing with your gas tax money to repair bridges and roads.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe you are too busy to feel concern about such matters.

Next: A dangerous gamble in 1776.

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