Pearls: Preservation and progress

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

I took part in something fairly special this past weekend, the bicentennial celebration for a Missouri church.

My ancestors on my mother’s side were among the founding members of Old New Garden Primitive Baptist Church, located near Wood Heights in Ray County, Missouri. I have attended many, many services there, and it was truly inspirational to be able to observe such an occasion.

After coming down from the wonderful spiritual renewal I felt from the service I began to consider the more practical, possibly worldly side of the anniversary meeting. You know, we’re going to have some institutions beginning to turn 200 years old around here in the next couple decades.

There’s a ripple that began on the east coast decades ago, a wave of churches and municipalities and such having their bicentennials – and that’s a westward-moving trend, for obvious reasons of the settlement pattern of the American continent.

Several of our local towns just wrapped up their sesquicentennials, marking 150 years since their founding. Our family’s newspaper, The Tri-County Ledger, carries the issue number of the older newspaper in our merger a few years ago, The Albany Ledger. We just began publishing Volume 157 – so the 257th year of Gentry County’s oldest (surviving) newspaper.

Yes, the institutions of our republic are gradually turning 200 in a steady roll from east to west. As our history deepens and our traditions age, we find ourselves facing one of the great dilemmas with which humanity has always wrestled:

What aspects of our society should we plan to keep another 200 years, and which are we content to see some to an end?

Preservation has been such a frequently visited theme in our nation: to keep sacred and visible the emblems of our heritage. Progress seems to be preservation’s most common foil, and it is the force of progress that dares us to defy tradition and build something new from the soil and brick of this republic.

I myself find the struggle to be a bitter one. Preservation is my lifeblood as a small-town journalist: the fact that the communities we serve have had a printed newspaper for so long compels me to continue in the pursuit, to put the Ledger into the public’s hands in honor of the 156 years the paper already has behind it.

But it’s progress that allows us to do it. There is no means by which I could afford the staff or take upon myself the task of printing newspapers the way they did it 156 years ago. We use technology, the internet and have our product printed on a press that would have baffled our ancestors in the trade.

So I am an advocate of both preservation and progress. Too much of one, however, and my observation is that the other suffers.

Perhaps at this moment I err on the side of preservation. I have kept our newspaper as a print product exclusively, which has cost me in terms of maintaining a following of readers younger than I. On the other hand, I have watched many newspapers nationwide forsaking their print product in the pursuit of the online dollar, only to find they can’t compete with the rest of the entire internet for people’s attention and patronage.

Where the fulcrum point is on that teeter-totter of preservation and progress, I am not sure. Maybe there isn’t one. Perhaps progress is just destined to win the fight, and few of our newspapers will see their 200th anniversaries. Or maybe the force of preservation will remain strong, and we will see a resurgence of interest in local journalism. As the big-city daily papers continue to fold, perhaps folks seeking local news will return to the more traditional print product.

More than likely, some combination of these two outcomes will represent the actual future of our paper and others. While I am sentimental, frequently finding myself unwilling to surrender tradition to an uncertain future, I also understand the force of progress to be a powerful one. We shall see how things go.

Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.