Editorial

Help Us Help You

This week, after a few long months of studied work, which included numerous failed and frustrating attempts, multifaceted thoughts and endless meetings as well as significant and intelligent breakthroughs, Iron String Press unveils its newly redesigned, modern, long-awaited, readable, and truly navigable website: AllOtsego.com, the online home of “The Freeman’s Journal” and “Hometown Oneonta.” This is our latest, and certainly not our last, effort to add significantly to a series of improvements designed to better serve our community.

Aside from our exciting and improved website, which also provides for a wider circulation and better advertising opportunities, we have taken on a number of new writers and contributors, all of whom are local, and locally knowledgeable, and all of whom are well versed and diligent in the sublime and oft-misused art of writing. They choose their topics, perform their research, and write articles, stories, and columns with our readers in mind—to inform and entertain them, answer their questions, and present the facts, from either and all sides. Their goal is information, not controversy, though at times even those facts can, and will, create their own controversy, notwithstanding our fair and balanced, as it were, reporting.

What is most important here is the recent significant growth and positive improvement of the newspapers themselves. Subscriptions and circulation have risen during the past two years of the company’s new ownership; there has been a flurry of positive comments (as well as a smattering of duly deserved and horribly helpful criticisms), both registering the most welcome increase in reader participation in our communities; and we also note the vastly augmented involvement by area organizations, which are now flooding our offices with news and information each week, and by our readers themselves in their letters to the editor.

“The Freeman’s Journal”—along with its offshoot, now gone, publications (the “Richfield Springs Mercury,” the “Cherry Valley Gazette,” the “Milford Tidings,” the “Otsego Farmer”)—has been recording the history of Cooperstown and Otsego County for 215 years, longer than most any other weekly in the country. “Hometown Oneonta” is a relative newcomer, serving the southern end of Otsego County for the last 15 years. Some ownership and recording phases have been better than others; we stand determined to ensure that our time as stewards of community journalism will ultimately be considered to be as reliable, informative, and informed as any in the past.

Local media is most critical when danger looms. Threats to the beauty of our area or to our rural lifestyle that we all cherish are always lurking on the sidelines—raising their heads in their own time—as are challenges to Otsego Lake and our other important water bodies, such as the current HAB encroachment. A newspaper should be all over these, reporting on meetings and decisions and progress. Ours is.

Decision-makers at all levels of local, state, and federal government typically gauge community support or disdain for proposed projects by the opinions expressed in and by the local media outlets—through regular and thorough reporting, editorials, and letters to the editor—making such outlets the most potent defense against unwanted or unwise projects. Your media voice is imperative in pursuing decisions that benefit our villages and communities. Without that voice anything can, and will, happen.

So let us not lose that smart, strong voice. Nothing can resurrect a local news outlet without the full support of the community it serves. Do you have $2.99? That’s all it takes to stay informed and engaged every month via AllOtsego.com. It’s also a simple way to champion a valuable community resource.

We are doing our part. Will you do yours?