To avoid any confusion, portions of this letter are written sarcastically. Since we haven’t yet developed a universal way of communicating sarcasm digitally, I thought it was necessary to say this as a small aside: Spirit Newspaper will continue to be printed for the foreseeable future. Mostly likely, for much longer than any of us really think is possible today.

 

Print Journalism is dead.

No, seriously. It died last week. I’m sure you heard them talking about it on the Internets.

We had to bury Print Journalism in the back yard next to our old dog, Rabbit. It was a rainy, gray, terrible day.

Even though we hear this moribund outlook so often, we thought it would be a good idea to take over a newspaper that had been serving a changing community—our community—for the past decade. What we saw in The Spirit was a publication with untapped potential in a neighborhood rich with stories, opinions and characters. The Riverwards were the place that taught us how to tell stories and the place we call home.

Seriously though, we get that line every day: “Didn’t you know, print journalism is dead.” At this point we don’t even argue. We nod and shrug like we’ve been caught doing something wrong then go to work and distribute thousands of copies of our paper to eager readers.

Surely, those folks who read newspapers, they’re a dying breed. At this point, as a newspaper, we’re staving off the inevitable end, circling the wagons and waiting for death, right? But then we see a few twenty-somethings arguing over an unfurled copy of The Spirit at a bar; get a text from a young neighbor up the block tipping us on a new story; someone walks into the office with their photos and stories of a weekend event we missed; a mysterious man drops off a blank envelope filled with “political secrets.”

Is this what the death rattle of an industry feels like? You croak surrounded by opportunity, help and support? To be honest, we don’t know. We’re young, full of ideas and with no shortage of optimism. But to us, that doesn’t sound like what it’s like to die. Instead, we think we’re just ready for a change.

That’s what this website is—a change in the way this neighborhood receives its news. We are on the ground, observing and hunting for the next story to tell. We’re committed to telling that story in a way that the Riverwards hasn’t seen before—with color, vision and a whole lot of investigation.

We’ve all been trained idolizing Woodward and Bernstein, Hunter S. Thompson, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Richard Harding Davis. Sure, we have a weekly hyperlocal paper, but we aren’t content with simply announcing the seasons in the headlines. We want to find stories. We want to dig deep and empathize deeper. But more than anything, I think we want the opportunity to elucidate issues, tell stories and capture moments like our heroes.

None of this makes sense: We are under-qualified and in a market many think is about to collapse. The odds are not in our favor. But the who, what and where don’t matter to us nearly as much as the why. We drag our asses out of bed every morning for one reason: To tell the story of our neighborhood. For good or for ill, we are the first draft of history for what happens here and now in the Riverwards.

A collection of building can be anything; a workplace, a living space, a prison. What allows a collection of buildings to be a community is an ever-present and evolving conversation between its residents.

Traditionally, a newspaper offers a place for this conversation to play out, but thanks to many upheavals in legacy media, small neighborhoods aren’t getting the attention they deserve. When these neighborhoods do have the luxury of a local newspaper it’s often no more than canned stories placed on pages in order to sell ads.

That’s not what we want to be.

We are hyperlocal done differently.