People say newspapers are dying.
But are they?

The media has always played a big role in people’s lives, but the way people receive their news has definitely changed.
There are now so many choices. People can go to Facebook, Instagram or even TikTok to find out what is happening. Something can happen in a community and, within minutes, someone has already posted a photo or video.

Compared to that, a weekly newspaper might seem slow.

Not long ago, someone online asked about the subscription price for the Lakeside Leader. Another person responded by basically saying to just go to Facebook because it was better.

Some people might agree.
Others probably won’t.

But it raises an interesting question: Is getting information quickly the only purpose of a newspaper?
The Lakeside Leader publishes many feature stories about people throughout the community. Sometimes they are about businesses.
Sometimes they are about athletes, volunteers, students or simply someone doing something interesting.

And sometimes those stories mean more to people than reporters might realize.
After The Leader published a feature about the Witch’s Nook, the owner said her parents were very proud of her.

Another local business owner, who was featured in a story about her massage services, said she planned to frame the article.

There are also stories about Jasper Fornoles, who competes for quad tournaments written by The Leader’s former editor Joe McWilliams and former reporter Pearl Lorentzen, that have been framed and kept for years. That says something about what a newspaper can still mean.

The Leader also visits local schools for Kid’s Talk. Some children have come to recognize the reporters simply as the “newspaper people.”

Maybe those children will grow up getting most of their news from their phones. Nobody knows what the media will look like by then.

But for now, they can open a newspaper and see their picture, their name and their answer printed on a page.
For that week, they become part of the community’s recorded history.

So, is the newspaper dying? Nobody can really say. Perhaps newspapers are simply changing.
And perhaps whether newspapers are dying depends partly on what people believe a newspaper is supposed to be.

But if a community newspaper is also there to record local businesses, children, athletes, volunteers, celebrations, struggles and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, there may still be plenty of life left in it.

At the end of the day, people will decide for themselves whether newspapers still matter.
Sometimes news is something people scroll past. And sometimes, it is something they frame.