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OPINIONS
May 30, 2019 |
 |
 Wingate Lassiter |
Who will save our history in an era
without newspapers we once had?
This week I ran into one of my greatest concerns about the absence of a newspaper that serves the local community as The Smithfield Herald did for more than a century before it faded into oblivion at the hands of corporate powers far removed from us.
I wanted to review stories about negotiations between the Town of Smithfield and Johnston County Public Schools to build the jointly used Recreation and Aquatics Center (a.k.a. SRAC), which celebrated its 10th birthday this week.
But there are no stories to be found in the archives of the Johnston County Heritage Center as one might expect. The reason: Editions of The Smithfield Herald for the weeks leading into May 2009 haven't been preserved because the company ceased microfilming the newspaper's contents at the end of 2007.
Furthermore, original copies of those papers haven't been saved, so far as I know, and I haven't seen anything online giving me digital access to the Herald's content 10 years ago.
Perhaps someday some of that, in the form of scrapbook cliippings, may show up here and there. The Heritage Center is pretty good about saving stuff like that. But retrieving content of the local newspaper covering the past couple of years will never be found, because it was never published. We haven't had The Smithfield Herald since the end of 2017, and even before that its local content had been reduced to nothing more than "bread crumbs."
My experience this week is just one example of how history is being lost with the demise of local newspapers. Many stories of community and personal accomplishment aren't being told by the local media still serving us. Newspaper staffs in particular are much too small nowadays to do the storytelling that's needed not only to enlighten us but also to document for posterity who we are and what we do.
And so, if you want your family's history, and your community's history, to be saved, you're going to have to do it on your own. Till something better comes along, whatever that may be.
Links to newspaper archives at the Johnston County Heritage Center:
Smithfield Herald Headlines, 1885-2007>
Newspaper Obituaries, 1800s-present>
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