Making Connections

I’ve been thinking a lot about making connections lately. The Gazette’s transition to a nonprofit from a for-profit enterprise has meant making a lot of connections between technical things that are needed to produce a digital newspaper.

The Gazette’s new web site connects to software that processes your donations. That connects to the bank for making deposits. The bank connects to accounting software. That’s just a few of the things that have been connected to automate the many processes involved in bringing The Hardwick Gazette to you.

Even with all those automated processes, people need to be involved. People in the Gazette office use software to lay out the paper. They copy the news articles, the event notices, the police report, the gardening columns, and what have you, onto the web site for you to read. They enter our deposits into the accounting software. They take that deposit to the bank where another person receives it and does whatever banks do with deposits.

Making each edition of our newspaper takes all of those people connecting with technology and each other.

Newspapers have been around a long time.

In Rome, about 69 B.C., a daily news sheet, called Acta Diurna (acts of the day) was published to report on activities of the Roman Senate. It seems reminiscent of our select board reports.

Marco Polo returned to Europe with the idea of the court gazette after his 13th century journey to the Orient.

The term Gazette has Italian origins. In 16th century Venice, accounts of frequent wars of the time were printed in a news bulletin, a copy of which could be bought with a small coin called a “gazetta.” That name stuck as a description of the paper, outliving the coin and giving the Hardwick Gazette its name.

That news was handwritten and distributed only in limited quantities.

When Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press came along in 1440 it became relatively inexpensive to distribute the news of the day and the mass market newspaper appeared. Almost overnight, the printing press transformed what a newspaper could be and paved the way for modern-day journalism.

Our word “press,” to describe those reporting for a newspaper, comes from that early technology.

Newspapers began appearing early in the 17th century, first in Germany, then throughout Europe. Those early publications were usually regulated by the government. In 1642, after civil war broke out in England, citizens turned to local papers for coverage of those major events. A weekly paper began focusing on domestic news. That paper fueled a discussion about the freedom of the press that continues to be an important component of our reporting today.

Just as those early newspapers “pressed” ink onto paper to make their connection with the people of that time, we make our digital connection with everything the Internet uses to deliver our digital newspaper to you.

From the beginning, both ends of the process of making a newspaper required a connection to people. Technology is only a vehicle. The press must first connect with the news being made, then through the technology, it creates its product, the newspaper. That must connect to real people. For us at The Hardwick Gazette, those people are you, our readers.

Our writers must be connected with their communities to connect with the people, the places, and the things they are writing about. Our photographers must do the same.

All the other connections are meaningless if The Hardwick Gazette doesn’t connect with someone like you to read our newspaper. We need to be giving you what you want to know about; what you need to know about to participate in the life of your community. If that’s not happening, we’re not connecting with what’s important.

If you are finding at least some of what you need, please consider making a contribution to help keep local, free and fair journalism alive in Hardwick and the 10 other area towns we cover.

by Paul Fixx, interim editor