Step Back To Move Forward

Let’s get back to a sense of community.I recently spent some time with some readers on some changes we want to make to the aesthetics of the paper. We are looking at doing a redesign of the paper to help make the reading experience better for everyone.Every now and again I gather readers from different aspects of the community and get input from them. This led to a discussion about community.We used to have a lot of social news in FJN. The ‘Chicken Dinner’ report as it was called. If you are a reader of any rural paper in the Midwest, you are familiar with the story that started out with, “John visited his sister Jane on Sunday and they had chicken, mashed potatoes and chocolate cake for dessert. John returned home Sunday evening.”People enjoyed this type of news. However, Facebook, a closing sense of community, privacy concerns and other factors led to a drastic decline in this type of news. It isn’t that people weren’t interested in reading that news, the demand was, and is, still there. However, the supply dried up. People didn’t want to share as much anymore and social media became the leading driver of this style of news.Newspapers were social media before social media existed.COVID came and killed off any semblance of a sense of community that was left. We are through COVID. We should be through the social media tangle. We should get back to a sense of community through a shared bond through the common experience of life.If you have social news, send it to us. There is some social news examples on Lifestyles (Page 5) this week. Let’s keep the trend going to build back our sense of community. If your kid had a birthday, tell us who attended, heck, even what kind of cake was served. Grandma, did the grandkids come to spend the day? What movies did you watch or what stories did you tell? Let us know.To progress forward, I think we need to step back a little and re-set.

FJN Overall Athlete of the Year 2021-2022

Audrey Searcey

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