I am continually impressed by the Daily Inter-Lake out of Kalispell. It's thin, of course, and I skip the national and international news, but they do reporting on local issues that I will never see anywhere else, and the reporting often seems pretty solid. And last year they had a huge standalone "living with wildfire" insert that was a tremendous public service.
I hope they manage to stay afloat. I worry they won't. But considering I get mailed reminders of renewal that require me only to send back a check for however many weeks (plus a delivery driver tip and some extra for Newspapers in Schools), maybe they're doing something else right besides reporting.
Great read. Deja vu all over again. I had an almost identical experience. (A slight digression, but I view having to give credit card info over the phone -- with extremely rare exceptions -- as a major fail.) The Gazette's website and customer service aren't much better. But without the CCN we would definitely be missing some important local stuff, so I go through the effort to subscribe. As we all should, unless things get too lame or more biased, if we want any sort of real, local journalism (the Montana Independent News and carboncountytruth.com don't count, for the most part), and we want to have the right to complain. Local news is important if we want to minimize local corruption, stop undesirable business ventures before they get started and prevent even more of a "good 'ol boy" network than we already have. I, too, had a young stint in local journalism, at the Livingston Enterprise, starting in the Nixon administration and ending in the Ford administration, so I wasn't at it long. Larry Mayer took my job when I left. His career really "took off" after that.
Sorry about your trials and tribulations with the subscription.
Good local newspapers tell natural stories, if one sticks with them through time. I can't think of any single source other than the Williston Observer if you want to know how this landscape from which I am writing has evolved over the decades. The reporting gets better and worse, as one would expect, but unless you want to read a lot (hundreds, maybe thousands) of meeting minutes, the newspaper is the narrative of how Williston change. Communities that do not have such a resource are seriously disadvantaged.
I am continually impressed by the Daily Inter-Lake out of Kalispell. It's thin, of course, and I skip the national and international news, but they do reporting on local issues that I will never see anywhere else, and the reporting often seems pretty solid. And last year they had a huge standalone "living with wildfire" insert that was a tremendous public service.
I hope they manage to stay afloat. I worry they won't. But considering I get mailed reminders of renewal that require me only to send back a check for however many weeks (plus a delivery driver tip and some extra for Newspapers in Schools), maybe they're doing something else right besides reporting.
Great read. Deja vu all over again. I had an almost identical experience. (A slight digression, but I view having to give credit card info over the phone -- with extremely rare exceptions -- as a major fail.) The Gazette's website and customer service aren't much better. But without the CCN we would definitely be missing some important local stuff, so I go through the effort to subscribe. As we all should, unless things get too lame or more biased, if we want any sort of real, local journalism (the Montana Independent News and carboncountytruth.com don't count, for the most part), and we want to have the right to complain. Local news is important if we want to minimize local corruption, stop undesirable business ventures before they get started and prevent even more of a "good 'ol boy" network than we already have. I, too, had a young stint in local journalism, at the Livingston Enterprise, starting in the Nixon administration and ending in the Ford administration, so I wasn't at it long. Larry Mayer took my job when I left. His career really "took off" after that.
Sorry about your trials and tribulations with the subscription.
Good local newspapers tell natural stories, if one sticks with them through time. I can't think of any single source other than the Williston Observer if you want to know how this landscape from which I am writing has evolved over the decades. The reporting gets better and worse, as one would expect, but unless you want to read a lot (hundreds, maybe thousands) of meeting minutes, the newspaper is the narrative of how Williston change. Communities that do not have such a resource are seriously disadvantaged.