Certainly, community newspapers, and the way they report the news, have changed by volumes in the past few years. Gone are the days when each town had its own independently-owned broadsheet paper, employing at least three staff members in the newsroom alone, not to mention countless others to design or typeset the beast and run in-house presses.

What hasn’t changed, however, is that residents in these towns are still hungry for local news. I’m talking hyper-local news at its core – why the police cars whizzed by their homes at 2 a.m.; who won that award from the service club; what is happening this weekend in the park, and how the latest bylaws passed at town council will affect them. No matter how urban the ownership of the newspapers will get, people will always want (and demand!) to know what is happening in their own backyards. This is especially important in rural settings, where the local paper is sometimes the only medium to report on the news of the town.

That being said, I have always found it incredibly interesting to dig back into old, crumbling issues of the papers where I’ve worked. What made the news of the day back then may seem trivial to us now, but it’s intriguing. So, a few times a week I am posting tidbits front page news from several of the area’s most established weekly papers – as it appeared 100 years ago in 1912. Enjoy and prepare to be enthralled (and to giggle every now and then).