As I've been talking to people about the new online Winchendon Courier, I've been surprised that many people haven't been aware that The Courier still exists. Everyone seems very pleased to hear that it does. But one individual said they'd heard The Courier had shut down some months ago. Another person remarked, when I said I was from The Courier, "oh, is that back?"

Over the past nine months, the online Courier has had faithful readers and people who have sent Ruth content regularly. The Facebook page has 565 followers and some posts reach twice that many people.

But even as a print edition, the Courier wasn't doing nearly as well as it should have. I've collected the PDF back issues from Stonebridge Press's website (all 546 of them, and you'll be able to read them as soon as I finish uploading them and coding the links list). Each fall, around October 1, mailed periodicals are required to print a circulation report. I used to compile those reports for the Acton-Boxborough Community Education brochure. I went through the Courier back issues, from 2008 through 2018, looking at the circulation numbers.

The quick summary is that circulation dropped 38 percent over those ten years. Both subscriptions and newsstand sales dropped the same percentage. The amount of space filled with paid advertising went down a lot, too, although I'm only judging that visually. By 2018, I can count the total number of advertisers in The Courier on the fingers of my two hands. (And let me add I want to thank those advertisers very much for your support!)

I don't have hard financials available, but it's fairly obvious that the print paper could not possibly have been sustaining itself. It's no wonder that Stonebridge Press decided to discontinue the title. As I said last week--publishing is a business. Publishers are notoriously unsentimental. It's a ruthless industry and ultimately it's all about the money.

But reading the early history of The Winchendon Courier, in Lois Stevenson Greenwood's Winchendon Years 1764-1964, I wonder how this happened.

"It's just trends in the industry," people say. "Print newspapers are all dying. Everyone gets their news online." And so on.

Maybe so. And maybe not.

In the early 1980s, I worked for Beacon Communications, which published eleven weekly town newspapers, just like The Courier--but each one was twice as big. They were twice as big because they were chock-full of ads. They were chock-full of ads because we had an advertising department, of about half a dozen full-time employees, who did nothing but solicit ads. I was one half of the entire circulation department for the entire company. One of my responsibilities was supervising telephone subscription drives. We ran those subscription drives all the time. We never stopped. We just focused on different newspapers.

Those are the kinds of efforts that get dropped when small local papers are bought up by big media companies. Hand-selling local ads stops. Circulation drives stop. Local editors are over-worked and left without any support. When circulation plummets, local papers are merged together (that happened to the titles published by Beacon Communications after it was bought out by Gatehouse Media--the same company that just bought The Gardner News).

And when the newspapers flounder and fail, the media companies just shrug and blame the Internet.

But it's not that simple. People need and want local news. They want to know what's going on in their communities and what will affect them as taxpayers and homeowners. They want to see their kids in the paper, and see events they worked on publicized.

It's television, not the Internet, that is the real enemy of newspapers and reading in general. The strength of a local newspaper is that it reports on things that you'll never see on big city newscasts. WHDH isn't going to cover Winchendon's events. You won't see local school sports on Channel 4.

When local newspapers fail and disappear, they're sorely missed. But The Winchendon Courier is older and a more important part of its community than most. When "trends" get tough, small newspapers have to work harder. That's the trouble. Big media companies think they can buy a "brand," sit back, and let it coast on its laurels.

I know better.