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Good writing

Irrelevant said:
It does get better, but I've already had to recalibrate my expectations.
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Recalibrate in what way?

I still haven't read infinite jest, but I plan to sometime in the future. I really enjoy his essays and interviews though. I read "Consider the Lobster" off the recommendation of my freshman English professor when I was writing an essay about c&r fishing mortality, and it really gave me a lot to think about at the time.
 
Perlodid said:
Recalibrate in what way?

I still haven't read infinite jest, but I plan to sometime in the future. I really enjoy his essays and interviews though. I read "Consider the Lobster" off the recommendation of my freshman English professor when I was writing an essay about c&r fishing mortality, and it really gave me a lot to think about at the time.
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it's a giant novel, and I'm not a speed reader and I'm only a few hours in. But so far the introduction is quite accurate. It's not an easy read. I'm not sure, in fact I'm certain, I'm missing things already. Definitely not easy to track characters.
 
Irrelevant said:
it's a giant novel, and I'm not a speed reader and I'm only a few hours in. But so far the introduction is quite accurate. It's not an easy read. I'm not sure, in fact I'm certain, I'm missing things already. Definitely not easy to track characters.
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Understandable for sure, I have heard that it can get pretty convoluted. It really is a bit daunting, as someone who hasn't been reading as often I would like. I feel like it would take me months to get through it at the pace I have been reading at lately.
 
Perlodid said:
Understandable for sure, I have heard that it can get pretty convoluted. It really is a bit daunting, as someone who hasn't been reading as often I would like. I feel like it would take me months to get through it at the pace I have been reading at lately.
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I'm shooting for 4-5 months
 

A eulogy for the Empire Press​

Newspapers do not die the way people do. They go by quieter routes — a thinning of pages, an editor’s sigh in a too-bright office, the slow retreat of advertisers who were once neighbors and now live mostly online. And then, at last, a final edition. Ink still drying. A headline that knows it is the last of its kind.

This is that edition.

The Douglas County Empire Press — born in 1888 as the Big Bend Empire, merged and renamed and reborn more times than the county itself has harvest seasons — closes its pages today. A small paper from a small town, yes. But also a long-standing witness. A century-plus chronicle of births, barn fires, bumper crops, school board kerfuffles, snowstorms, county fairs, and the infinite dramas of ordinary life that never make the national news but absolutely make a place a place.

It began in the age of railroads and wheat wagons. It endured through the rise of telephones, highways, television, the internet and whatever it is we are living in now — the blur of “content,” a word that always feels like it was designed to replace something more meaningful.

The Empire Press outlived many of its peers. It made it through depressions, recessions and ownership changes, through shifting print days, thinner margins, new mastheads and the slow attrition of the rural population it served. Reporters came and went. Publishers held on longer than they probably should have. Each believed, in the stubborn and slightly irrational way that journalists do, that the work still mattered.

It did.

For decades, this paper anchored Douglas County. It told people who won the spelling bee. It documented the votes that shaped the courthouse. It printed weddings and obituaries with equal respect. It published corrections — small acts of self-humility that feel nearly radical today. And it did this work with the same earnest conviction whether the subscriber list was 2,000 or 200.

We could say the Empire Press is closing because of economics — and we would not be wrong. The print model no longer supports itself. Advertisers have relocated to algorithmic marketplaces. Readers scroll instead of subscribe. News — real news — costs time and salaries and a kind of civic patience that is harder to come by.

But there is another, quieter truth: newspapers depend on the belief that a community is a shared thing. When that belief thins, so does the paper.

Even so, this publication leaves behind a long wake. It leaves bound volumes in libraries and museums. It leaves microfilm reels that hum softly in state archives. It leaves yellowed clips taped inside family scrapbooks. It leaves the memory of names printed in bold for the first time — a wrestler who won districts, a farmer who saved a neighbor’s field, a 4-H kid who raised a grand champion goat.

It leaves the record of Douglas County as it actually was, not as nostalgia later smooths it.

And that is no small gift.

If a newspaper is, as someone once said, the first rough draft of history, then the Empire Press has left a draft that is tender, stubborn and faithful to its landscape. It knew this place. It loved this place. And for more than a century, it showed up — even when the roads were iced over or the budget didn’t pencil out or no one answered the phone at town hall.
This is the final issue. The last delivery will land with a soft thud in the mailboxes of Waterville, Mansfield or Bridgeport, the sound almost indistinguishable from all the others that came before it.

But newspapers never disappear entirely. They feather out into the people who read them, who keep them, who remember something they learned in one small story in one small paper that one small week in February.

If you hold this issue in your hands, linger with it. Let the ink smudge your fingers a little. It is the last physical proof of a long community conversation — one that began in 1888, when a printer in Waterville believed a new county deserved a voice.

Today, we honor that voice. Today, we say goodbye.

And today, in the gentle quiet that follows the final press run, we remember what a newspaper can be: a mirror, a neighbor, a witness and, sometimes, a keeper of the soul of a place.
 
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