Fifteen years ago I was visiting a friend in Florida who told me that in another 20 years there would be no such thing as newspapers. Five years after that, I went to work for this weekly newspaper. Now, ten years later, the Wiscasset Newspaper has not gone away, and is, in fact growing, like many other weeklies.

Yes, some of the really big newspapers have gotten into a whole lot of trouble, and some of them have gone by the wayside. Some, like the Boston Globe, are still struggling to stay afloat.

I have my own little view of why this has happened. First, the big newspapers had lots of money years ago. In many cases, there was only one daily in a city – and greedy newspaper owners kept taking advantage of that fact – raising the rates every year, and hiring more and more employees. Although newspapers had gotten used to sharing the market with radio, then with television, when the Internet came along, accompanied by the huge changes in computer technology, those huge profits started to erode. Combine that with the millions of dollars they had to plow into new presses and computers, and it wasn’t long before the big profits started to dwindle. As they lost ad revenue and the number of pages decreased, the news in small towns began to disappear, and people began to stop buying the papers.

Meanwhile, the little weeklies were struggling along as usual during the fat-cat days of the dailies. Many weeklies, like ours, were published by owners for whom it was "a calling," or a labor of love. Providing news about small towns meant covering selectmen’s meetings and planning board meetings that the dailies no longer covered. It meant running lists of honor rolls and scout awards that the dailies no longer had room for.

Look around at how radio, tv, and countless other segments of the economy are doing. As Brian Steffens wrote in Publisher’s Auxiliary this week, although ad revenue for newspapers is down 25 percent, car sales in September dropped by 23 percent – but no one is writing headlines that say, "Auto Industry To Disappear." He points out that 69 percent of the population still use newspaper ads to make buying decisions and 70 percent still use newspapers to find the best sales and products available.

Time will tell which newspapers can make the adjustments needed to stay profitable – but in the meantime, don’t write us off.

- Paula Gibbs