As a kid it seemed a little magical though. One could contact the Argus staff and have real items put to print. There was someone to call if one had Sunapee News. Then as surely as the sun always rises, in the upcoming issue, the item would appear. It may have been only as significant as the car wash a school class was putting on to make some cash.
I don't to wax philosophical but I can say that decades before the Internet, it provided me with the first concrete proof that words and pictures could affect a lot of people. Books, of course, could be read by many, but the Argus-Champion was read by the neighbours! The newspaper would even publish something written by high school students as an editorial. That, somehow, made it all the more important to me.
When I first went overseas, writing to the editor seems a suitable way of sharing with the community. There are a lot of people to whom I wouldn't actually write a personal letter; yet, I sometimes wanted to share something with the larger audience of readers. The Argus served that function. Even most of a lifetime later, I've referenced personal impacts of things in the Argus in my eJournal and images.
The following article was published in the Concord Monitor on July 20, 2008. It made me a little sad when I caught it under a Google News customized category. It seemed as if part of my own history had disappeared.
In Sunapee region, a voice is silenced
Death of a newspaper leaves a hole hard to fill
By Mike Pride
Monitor columnist
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July 20, 2008 - 12:00 am
When a newspaper dies, a community loses its voice. It loses the mirror in which it examined its best features and its worst. It loses the bulletin board for news of a neighbor's death or a schoolgirl's scholarship. It loses its watchdog, the reporters who kept tabs on town hall, the school board, local elections.
When a newspaper dies, a community becomes less of a community. It suffers a blow from which it is difficult to recover.
Last week, when the Argus-Champion announced that it was going under, I felt that blow as both a journalist and a member of the community. This is the 11th summer that I have lived in a pond-side camp in Goshen, which is about 10 miles from Newport, the Argus's original base. I have relied on the paper for many things, though not as many as full-time residents have.
When I moved to New Hampshire in 1978, one of the first journalists I met was Ed DeCourcy, then the editor of the Argus. Ed was a robust, good-natured man with a signature bow tie and a fierce devotion to community journalism. He was also living proof of the value of journalistic independence.
Once, when some advertisers threatened to boycott the paper after the Argus endorsed a candidate they opposed, Ed wrote: "A publication that would surrender to any financial pressure, however great or small, to espouse a cause in which it did not believe, to remain silent on an issue about which it had convictions, to withhold legitimate news, or to publish material that had no news value, is not a newspaper. It is a prostitute."
Ed left the Argus's editor's chair more than a quarter-century ago and died in 2005 at the age of 93. It is a tribute to him and his paper that old-time Argus readers mentioned him by name as news of the paper's closing spread.
The Argus changed after Ed's day. It expanded its base into wealthier towns, including Sunapee and New London, and moved its office out of Newport. Some Newport residents rued the loss of hometown identity, but the Argus still paid close attention to their town. On this week's front page, near the note about the paper's demise, the lead story recounted the celebration of Andrea Thorpe's 20th anniversary as town librarian.
Tying towns together
The broadened readership area tended to tie disparate communities together. Almost every town had a weekly columnist who kept track of everything from birthdays to charity book sales to Old Home Day preparations. But the paper was small enough that you could easily scan all the town columns to keep up with the news.
Its pages were full of useful news. In either an ad or the news columns, the Argus informed readers when Bartlett's was opening for blueberrying and what band was playing at the Anchorage. It acted as a Fourth of July planning guide for fireworks lovers willing to rove from town to town.
Like all good weeklies, it covered milestones - graduations, anniversaries, obituaries. It told parents when to register the kids for Little League or kindergarten. And it had an old-fashioned sports page that took all local athletics and athletes seriously.
The Argus retained a good eye for the minutia that inquiring minds wanted to know. Readers could tsk-tsk about the motorist nabbed doing 93 on I-89 in Sutton. Before the real estate market went bust, they could find out what outrageous price someone had just paid for the neighbor's house.
Readers could also depend on the paper for a sense of continuity. Roger Small's weekly column sampled back issues of the Argus. Small might report on Teddy Roosevelt's visit to Newport. Or, as he did in an item picked up this week from 1908, he might write: "The rumor that Chester Hopkins, the Boston boy, had the measles was unfounded, as he only had prickly heat."
The heart of the Argus remained its focus on town affairs, civic and communal. It was primarily a newspaper, whether it was covering the opening of a general store, an arrest in a local robbery or a dispute over an out-of-town developer's lavish designs. The Argus gave you the feeling that its reporters were everywhere at once.
Losing money
The note from Publisher Harvey D. Hill announcing the paper's closing was terse. We're sorry, but the paper is losing money and we're closing it, he wrote. He mentioned the trends that are affecting newspapers everywhere: "We see more and more of our readers and advertisers migrating to the internet."
This is no doubt true, but Argus readers - people who care about their communities - are about to lose something the internet cannot replace. Heck, in Goshen, if there's a way to get high-speed internet, I haven't found it. Even where it is available, it offers nothing to rival the Argus as a local newspaper.
Through more than a century and a half, the Argus has been a reliable source of the most important information in the daily lives of its readers. It has been the tie that binds diverse towns into a community. In a chaotic world, it has kept people with common interests on the same page and provided them with a free forum to sound off about public issues.
These are the sad facts behind the shocked expressions I saw as people around here heard that the Argus was going under. As much as these readers might have complained about the local paper over the years, they know that life won't be the same without it. Its closing is a tragic loss.