With gratitude: We made it because of you

The challenge of keeping any business or service going for 125 years cannot be overstated: As times change, needs change, and there are no easy answers to remaining relevant. So for a small community weekly newspaper like The Lakeville Journal to have continued over all these years was not a given.

Consider the rate at which other community media outlets have been closing over the past few years, and continue to close. This news outlet is grateful to be here still to serve our communities in the Northwest Corner and beyond.

But we would not be here without the extremely generous support of our readers, donors and advertisers. When this newspaper saw the writing on the wall in 2019 that it would not be able to survive without taking desperate measures, and asked for extra community support to continue publishing weekly, the call was answered and exceeded. Now having attained nonprofit status, we can offer our donors additional benefits, and can apply for grants otherwise unavailable to us.

Thank you to all our supporters and to everyone who reads their local news every week. However you find us, in print or online, our goal is to be here for you as long as you want to know about what’s happening in your communities.

— Janet Manko, publisher and editor in chief

Celebrating 125 years

In a country ruled by division — every front page of every major newspaper is about division — here in the countryside we have our own. We have our weekend residents from Manhattan and Brooklyn, we have the former weekenders making the shift to the weekday local life. We have the old-timers, the Connecticut families with passed down legends of long ago, who remember the iron works and furnaces, the secrets and scandals, the festivals and fairs.

But whether you’re a movie star, a self-published historian, a newcomer, or the great-great-great grandson of a family with their name on a street sign, what makes this corner of the countryside special is that we all share. Together we squeeze into the aisles of the grocery store, we cozy up at the bar in winter, we stretch out at Lakeville Lake. In a close-knit community of little equalizers, The Lakeville Journal has stood the test of time as one of our most reliable.

The same paper for everyone, covering everyone, printed every week. It’s the hub for announcements from every organization in our region: the nonprofit fundraisers, the church tag sales, the local government meetings, the land preservation grants. It marks the graduations, the wedding announcements, the memorial services and the tributes to the lives we’ve lost.

The Journal has been witness to the greatest achievements of our small towns, even the little ones, especially the little ones, the victories that the rest of the world would never notice. The Journal has been there at every record breaking ski jump, at the garden tours, at the middle school play. When a volunteer receives an award for their lifetime of service, when a girl and her horse nail that big jump, when a black bear on Main Street is finally caught by the wildlife preserve, The Journal’s been there.

We’re a community of New England traditions, and The Lakeville Journal, founded in 1897, stands alongside our oldest 19th-century institutions — the stone libraries, the boarding schools, our historic inns and our landmark homes. The current staff — our editors and writers, photographers and delivery drivers — are not the owners of this 125-year-old paper. We are its caretakers. We have inherited its past, we preserve its present. But it is only together, as a community, with donor support, that we ensure it remains a tradition with a future.

— Alexander Wilburn, senior associate editor