HOW THE ERIE TIMES-NEWS SNUFFED OUT THE LIGHTS OF COMMUNITY JOURNALISM IN ERIE COUNTY

In a Good Morning column today entitled "Thankfully a Light shines on", Times-News Reporter Ed Pallatella regaled us with a beguiling narrative of a small weekly newspaper for which he once worked on the West Coast as an intern known as the Point Reyes Light.
Like most small newspapers, existence for the Light was and is a constant and precarious struggle, surviving through two changes of ownership despite the fact that it was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize. According to Pallatella, it's now owned by a non-profit.
"The Light's future is far from settled;" he wrote: "the paper likely will need grants to stay in business over time. For now, the Light is still burning, an example of newspaper's bond with its community...Its story, to the relief of its readers (and one former intern) has not ended."
Ed's story reminds me of the fate of half a dozen weekly newspapers here in Erie County which weren't so lucky. Once known as the Brown-Thompson Newspapers, they were the information and advertising lifelines of communities like North East, Edinboro, Girard, Union City and others.
Their lights were snuffed out by Ed's employer, the Times Publishing Co., which bought them several years ago, then within a few years, predictably terminated their existence which in one case had lasted about one hundred years, my hometown newspaper, The North East Breeze.
Seems the Times's owners didn't want the weeklies, whose advertising rates were roughly half those of its flagship daily, The Erie Times-News, competing for the various communities' advertising dollars with the daily newspaper. So they shut them down, leaving the small communities without a voice, forcing their small businesses and governing bodies to pay big city rates for advertising space in the Times-News.
At the time, The Times promised the communities would not suffer for want of local news because the Times-News would publish a community page each week devoted exclusively to news in the newspaperless towns. But that promise was soon extinguished.
Sadly, in this case, thanks to the Times Publishing Co., the lights have gone out.