GOODBYE TO A SPECIAL PAPER

There have been thousands of newspapers that have gone into permanent retirement, many of them community papers including the Coleraine Albion, my hometown paper, the Canadian paper, Cut Knife Highway 40 Courier which carried a biweekly editorial from Tuc the Cat although his words are still available on his blog but now the Wiener Zeitung, an Austrian paper has ceased production at the end of the financial year with only a limited online presence available. 

Like many papers it died because of a lack of advertising revenue, in this case after a government advertising policy change but the story is a bit more complex as it was first published in 1703 and was recognised as the oldest paper still being published or at least until three days ago. 

We need more papers, especially physical ones and so the death of the longest lasting paper is a great loss. 

As an obsessive letter writer, I had discussed with its letter editor why I wrote to his paper, among many, and it was the age of the paper that impressed me. For a paper to survive for over 320 years it must be a good paper. 

A paper provides the news, some ads, a lot of sports but its main benefit is that it connects the local community as almost everyone reads it. They provide the stories that make an event more than just a name and date but a part of a community’s history. 

Dennis Fitzgerald, 

Melbourne, Australia