By FRED KRONER
Last week’s news hit like the unexpected death of a family member: Sudden and swift, without any foreshadowing.
One day, we’re reading the Mahomet Citizen.
The next day, we learn it is stopping publication. For good. Forever.
It’s not hyperbole for me personally to refer to the publication as family.
Its predecessor, the Mahomet Sucker State, provided me with my first opportunity to write for a newspaper when I was barely a teen-ager.
Less than 18 months after I retired from The News-Gazette – which owns the Mahomet Citizen – I was lured out of retirement to serve as one of the five editors who have been at The Citizen since January, 2017.
Even before that, I was a weekly contributor to the Citizen’s sports section for a year-and-a-half, starting in 2015.
Whether it was as an employee or as a reader, the Mahomet Citizen printed newspaper has been a part of my life since Carol Curtis resurrected the community newspaper in my hometown in December, 1975.
Learning about its imminent demise – which will take place in a matter of days – is heartbreaking and will create a huge void.
Through the efforts of Mahomet historian Greg Pasley, we know that a weekly printed newspaper has been a prominent part of Mahomet’s fabric – except for short periods of time – since 1878 when the Mahomet Magnet printed its first edition.
In the following 142 years, Pasley’s research shows that the Magnet gave way to the Sucker State, but that the Magnet made a triumphant return before the Sucker State came back and became a staple for nearly three-fourths of a century.
The Sucker State folded in November, 1974, leaving Mahomet residents without a source for local news for 13 months until Curtis stepped forward.
The guess here is that there won’t be another savior on the horizon – though the Mahomet Daily will continue its efforts to chronicle the village’s newsworthy events – as is the case nationally.
In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that more than 2,000 newspapers had closed in the previous 15 years. A majority of those were weekly newspapers.
There are plenty of examples within the confines of Central Illinois. The News-Gazette shut down the award-winning weekly, the LeRoy Farmer City Press in 2017, a year after the Illinois Press Association recognized it as the best weekly newspaper in its size in the state.
In 2018, News-Gazette-owned weeklies in St. Joseph and Tolono were also shut down.
And now, the Mahomet Citizen – judged as one of the top two weeklies by the Illinois Press Association in 2018 – will soon be history after an existence that was in its 46th year.
Therein lies the biggest issue.
How will history be recorded and preserved in a growing village that now officially numbers at least 8,400 residents?
Newspapers have traditionally been the source of historical data for small-town America. For Mahomet, anyone who is so inclined can still diligently research and learn about highlights from the village since 1878, when Mahomet was barely 40 years old.
There are some among us who consider history to be boring, but the truth is that it provides clues about who we are now, how we got here and helps us to simply learn about ourselves as a whole.
Knowing about our past helps us to prepare for our future. We can learn about who the movers and shakers were in yesteryear and how their contributions affect us today.
Newspaper files and microfilm are filled with stories about the family for whom Taylor Field is named.
The archives have stories that detail the exploits of a football program that was under the leadership of a man for whom the high school field is now named.
We can learn who the superintendent was in the 1960s and what it took to gain voter approval to build Lincoln Trail Elementary School on State Street.
Of course, it’s not just the big stories that are preserved for posterity. There’s the story about the 90-year-old who was surprised with a birthday celebration or information about who was the mayor earlier this century when Mahomet received recognition as a Tree City USA and what it took for that to occur.
The Champaign Multimedia Group, which purchased The News-Gazette last fall and almost immediately began purging the staff, mailed a letter to Mahomet Citizen subscribers last week.
Among the promises made were, “Beginning in June, The Champaign News-Gazette will introduce a new daily section, Champaign County, which will give daily coverage to the great towns of Mahomet, Rantoul, St. Joseph and more.”
It remains to be seen how this will be carried out by a skeleton staff that doesn’t look anything like the dozens of journalists who populated the newsroom during the 1990s.
At one time, there were 11 full-time employees in the sports department along with another half-dozen part-time contributors.
Even then, it was a daunting task to be everywhere and to cover everything.
I’m sure that there are now good intentions. I’m also convinced that any emphasis from the daily newspaper will be on the headline stories and not the everyday stories that help to demonstrate why Mahomet is a special and – at times – unique place.
All too clear in our minds are the promises made two years ago when The News-Gazette shuttered the weekly newspapers in St. Joseph and Tolono, about how those communities would be highlighted in the pages of the daily local news section.
It sounds good, but reality is often a different beast than intentions.
Regardless of what transpires within the (diminishing) pages of The News-Gazette, there is hope that a permanent record of Mahomet events will remain.
At the very least, The Mahomet Daily staff will continue to work tirelessly to document community stories, both the ones which are big for all of us as well as the ones which are only big to some of us.
It is also possible that The Mahomet Daily will implement a limited print option to supplement the content that will remain available online daily. We hope to have an announcement soon.
One Comment