Commentary by Steven Price

I wake up every morning in a town of 3,700 people, a village really, that harbors many of the people I know and love and most of the places I conduct my daily life’s business. But the primary newspaper I read originates in a metropolis of 8.5 million people, all strangers to me, and where I visit maybe once in a decade. If I jump on my computer for more global news the dichotomy of scale is even greater. Such is the modern world, but the older I get (73 in August) the more discordant and disconnected—and just plain dumb— this situation feels to me. It’s out of whack, too disproportional to the life I lead.

I tell myself it’s because I have a “higher identification” with the world at large, but if I’m honest that’s really a justification for not paying closer attention to what’s happening right around me. Like the paradoxical idiom: “The closer you are the farther you get.” Go figure. But for me it’s a real condition. I spend too much time viewing the world through a telescope and not enough time seeing it through a microscope.

Enter The Local News, our new online, independent, nonprofit, citizen-run community newspaper, created to fill the “news desert” we live in, now that the Journal-Tribune and the Kennebunk Post have gone the way of the dodo. (Having grown up in Las Vegas, Nevada, I know something about deserts, real and metaphorical—they’re dry, desolate, and offer little sustenance.)

A popular bumper sticker proclaims, “Think Globally, Act Locally.” I like the sentiment, conceived to promote environmental sustainability. But in a broader sense it commands us to connect large-scale awareness to grassroots community-level execution. But the reverse is also true: We must think (and act) locally to collectively have any impact on global issues. And that starts with being informed about what’s happening in our local community—town governance, school activities, housing issues, business news, environmental concerns, volunteer opportunities, and so much more. Exactly the things The Local News is committed to covering, and what we should be paying attention to.

I started my journalism career as a beat reporter on a small-town daily in Pennsylvania. It was the hardest job I ever had, but also the most satisfying. It connected me to my community in a way that nothing had in my life until then. I cringe when I think about the boneheaded mistakes I made in my novice attempts to accurately record the daily life of small-town America, from misquoting the mayor on a regular basis to confusing a burglary with a robbery. I became a master of the next-day correction, to my editor’s pencil-snapping chagrin.

But I felt I was doing valuable community service. And that’s what The Local News is all about. So read it and learn, read it and laugh, read it and weep, read it and think and plan and act, and re-engage yourself with the lifeblood of your community.

I know I will.