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Lake and Valley Clarion NewspaperGenesee Country MagazineClarion Communications

Readers Comments:
In the Beginning . . .

 

Your publisher has asked me to return for a retrospective one-time only appearance on this momentous occasion­ the 10th-year anniversary of your locally-owned and operated weekly.

The 1989 birth of the Clarion was the vehicle which taught your writer firsthand the import of the old newspaper jibe, "it's not the Times that try men's souls...it's The Gazette." Or The Clarion, or whatever maddening, labor-intensive, expense-addled weekly is under discussion.

Corrin and The Clarion, THIS IS YOUR LIFE!!! As we rewind to early 1989, we find the death of former publisher Dorothea Bradley has permanently yanked the cash-feeding tube from the moribund Livonia Gazette and its brethren.

The pseudo-French-classical concrete edifice at Main and Spring Streets in Livonia has fallen into dilapidated silence for the first time in 115 years.

The proud towns of Livonia, Lima, Honeoye and Honeoye Falls without their local papers? It seemed unthinkable.

A small band of local entrepreneurs entered the breach. After all, newspaper publishing had undergone a technological convulsion that vastly reduced the capital requirements to produce a local weekly. Or, at least, that was the theory.

Longtime residents will remember the denizens of the former Gazette, laboring monumentally over inky, oily relics from the late steam age: the deafening Chandler sheet letterpress, the Mergenthaler Linotype, the Addressograph.

These hulking, dangerous dinosaurs had been quietly replaced by the silent and colorful phosphorescence of desktop-publishing PCs. Certainly a quality local weekly could be produced at a fraction of the costs that felled the Gazette. Couldn't it?

Suffice it to say that after two years or so of labor pains, midnight feedings and boardroom drama, The Clarion's founders found themselves expediently returning to their groceries and broadcasting, leaving the fate of the County's only locally-owned newspaper to the intrepid Strong family.

The suspicions of Frank West and this writer that the vastly greater resources of Corrin and Company would ensure longer-term success for our fledgling weekly have proven propitious. The Clarion's circulation has shot upwards from the heady days of the early 90s. Color and content have been added. The paper's sister publication, Genesee Country, a glossy pictorial magazine, is a community asset of which we can all be proud.

The small-town weekly newspaper as we knew it in the bygone days of the Livonia Gazette is endangered. Even within the limited confines of Livingston County, the recent newspaper mortality rate numbers in double digits.

It takes reader involvement, subscription and advertising support from an appreciative community to ensure that the local weekly's eclectic editorial mix keeps appearing on newsstands. From the school board elections to high school sports, gossipy community columns to lake levels, recipes, and rantings from Corrin, The Clarion is the only paper that, like its predecessor, the Gazette, "truly has the interests of this community at heart."

As the first and former publisher of The Clarion, let me exhort its readers: until the Genesee Valley Pennysaver starts stacking up Pulitzers (or, perhap even more laughably, until the D&C does) be sure you read, support, subscribe to, advertise in, interact with, and love your local paper. It reflects the lives of the people of Livingston like no other publication can.

Bob Savage
Clarion Founder

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