This is two love letters in one – the first from me to newspapers, which have provided an outlet for my passions and a fulfilling career in return.
And the second is from our newspapers to you – the citizens who rely on our news and the subscribers who are committed to keeping this vital institution going.
The occasion is National Newspaper Week, a celebration of the relevance of newspapers, and the journalists who keep them relevant, from Oct. 2-8. In Michigan, that relevance extends back nearly 190 years in some of our eight newspaper communities.
“Newspaper” has two definitions, the first being the institution that is a linchpin of the American form of government. That includes professional journalists, empowered and protected by the First Amendment, helping make citizens informed participants in democracy. We not only report the news around us, we also ask the hard questions and expose problems, wrongdoings and injustice.
The other definition is the physical product itself – words and images edited, packaged and printed on broadsheets of paper and then delivered to homes and newsstands.
In this fast-paced digital life, with news literally at our fingertips, it may surprise you that MLive still delivers and sells about 160,000 printed newspapers every Sunday across Michigan.
“Fans of newspapers will say there's nothing like the feeling of holding that newspaper in your hand, as opposed to a phone or computer, tablet, whatever,” said Jerry Seim, senior editor for the copy desk and production center that creates our newspapers.
“There's a sense of familiarity about it – I think it can even bring some comfort when you have all the noise of the world coming at you. You can have that ‘me time,’ where you can focus without distraction.”
Seim’s story doubtlessly is familiar to journalists and to print readers alike: He grew up in a home where papers were a daily habit. In his case, growing up in Detroit, it was two newspapers a day.
“My first entry the comics … and then I just branched out from there. You start to see interesting stories on the front page or elsewhere in the paper and pretty soon I'm spending part of my afternoon between church and the Lions game just going through the papers.”
Seim lives in the Grand Rapids area and has worked for The Grand Rapids Press and our parent company for 25 years. That local knowledge, from him and his colleagues, translates into the product.
“I think everybody on our team is Michigan born and bred, and we all know the state pretty well and we’re passionate about our homes,” he said.
We transfer that passion into newspapers so they have their own unique value proposition. Yes, a lot of what appears in print has run on MLive or is available elsewhere on the internet. But Seim and his team of editors add supplemental material, graphics and design elements, and more with the goal of giving readers a “lean back” reading experience.
“We’re trying to pick the most relevant and interesting and sometimes even just the most fun stuff, and curate it,” he said. “We're giving the readers the best of the best, especially on Sundays.”
Increasingly, part of the “added value” of our printed newspapers is a digital component. First, all eight of our newspapers have a daily electronic edition – literally, the whole designed newspaper accessible via the internet, right down to the comics and the advertisements.
(If you’re a subscriber and want to view today’s electronic edition, click here.)
Print subscribers also get full access to all of our “Subscriber Exclusive” content online, some of which may not appear in print due to space or deadline issues. If you’re a print subscriber who has not activated the digital component, click here.
If you take advantage of all the ways print has evolved – and not evolved, by still being available in their physical form – you can have news your way and also keep newspapers, the institution, strong well into the future.
“We're happy to continue to offer that to people as long as they're passionate about it,” Seim said.
🎧 In this week's episode of Behind the Headlines podcastJohn Hiner and Eric Hultgren talk about the new newsletter "Hello Ann Arbor" that digs deeper into the community of Ann Arbor and how this newsletter will expand to include other cities in 2023 Listen here on Spotify or here on Apple.
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John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com.
