DENTON, TEXAS - To have a community newspaper, you first need a community.
In 2000, I was living in Aurora, and visiting my son and his family in a rural neighborhood north of Vancouver. I remember walking around the quiet, peaceful area with my husband, and commenting with a sigh, “I would really love to live in a place a like this…a real community.”
A year later, we moved to Gilpin County, and I found my dream.
But there is one big problem in living in a beautiful, rural, mountain community: how do you find out what is going on? There’s no local radio or TV station with local news (though the “moccasin telegraph” is, I have to admit, pretty good).
I talked with my neighbors to learn the history of the place. From one I learned chicken husbandry and from another the difficulty of keeping roads open in winter—but not what is going on at the County offices, or where to find local music.
So I subscribed to both local newspapers, The Weekly Register-Call and The Mountain-Ear.
This is what a community newspaper is for: local news, including local government, community events, sports, school news, music, and food. And the occasional local, community-based disagreement on issues, carried out in ongoing letters to the editor.
But you probably won’t find us taking a position on those issues. That’s not what we do. Our job is to report what is happening in the community, fairly, without judging or taking sides.
Sure, there are larger issues than the ones we report on. But we are here to help you learn what is happening here in our community, where there is nothing like a newspaper that lets everyone know when there’s an accomplishment to be celebrated. And spells your name (and your kid’s) right—and apologizes on the rare occasions when we get it wrong.
Because we know you. And we care about what you are doing and how you are doing.
We have reporters who know the local businesses. Whose kids go to the same schools as yours. Who drive the same dusty or slippery roads. Who let you know when something from the Big World Out There is impinging on our tight-knit little bit of heaven.
A community newspaper is a place where you can drink from the deep well of institutional knowledge of long-time residents while incorporating the ongoing development of newer approaches to living in the mountains. (Case in point: when we moved to Gilpin, we had a second phone line dedicated to our dialup internet! Now I do all my work online.)
Life was much simpler when The Register-Call was first published, more than 150 years ago. It was still quite a bit simpler when The Mountain-Ear began its print run nearly 50 years ago.
At least partially because of your involvement, The Mountain-Ear has grown more sophisticated as it ages. We've become the timely, responsive journal you are reading that has now won many awards. And we still spell your name right.
