For the longest time, I missed reading an honest to God newspaper. Yeah, you can get your news online now, but it's not the same. Unfortunately, the Star Gazette is expensive and doesn't have enough there to line a parakeet cage with anymore. So last fall I took a chance on the Sayre Morning Times. They report a lot of stuff from down in The Valley of course, but there's still the occasional news item from Chemung, Van Etten, Baldwin etc.

Even when there isn't news about Chemung County, it's interesting to read stories about what's going on in the small towns in the region.

They only publish Tuesday through Saturday, so you won't get that big thick Sunday paper we all remember. The Saturday edition is about as close as you'll get to that, with a Tops flyer and an extra comics and puzzles section thrown in.

The national news items are a day old as you would expect, so often times I scan or skip over them. Still, if I only read a couple of interesting stories about local news and businesses, read Dear Abby and the comics, I call it a win. Some of the comics are stupid, not remotely funny, but I can't pin that on the paper. I wish they ran Peanuts, but oh well.

The paper is delivered by the US Postal Service. Apparently they take it to the Waverly post office, which ships it to the Elmira one and get it to us all in the same day. This usually works well, although during the holidays we missed several papers. I contacted the company and they made it right, as well as looked into the problem. Apparently a new employee didn't think that the paper needed to be sent to the address at the top. It's been a lot smoother since and we've only missed one or two papers. Again, they make it right.

It's interesting to me that the Morning Times can produce a quality newspaper like this but for some reason Gannett chooses not to put the effort in. Maybe someday a good newspaper, more local to here, will come out. But in the meantime, we're happy Morning Times subscribers.

2 hours ago, Chris said:

It's interesting to me that the Morning Times can produce a quality newspaper like this but for some reason Gannett chooses not to put the effort in.

Perhaps because the graduates in journalism colleges aren’t taught how to be a true journalist. They’re opinion piece writers. I would bet the writers contributing to this Newspaper are “old school”.

1 hour ago, Ann said:

Perhaps because the graduates in journalism colleges aren’t taught how to be a true journalist. They’re opinion piece writers.

No, it’s because they have a skeleton crew. Last I knew there was one reporter for here in Chemung County.

Gannett consolidated the SG, The Ithaca Journal and Corning Leader into one regional newspaper that’s largely USA Today articles, ads, and a local story or two. The three papers have different names and banners, but are nearly identical in content.

They also laid off a slew of staff, including journalists, and moved operations to Johnson City.

I miss the Sunday paper for sure. It was the only thing I subscribed to. Read obits, real estate sales, editorials and whatever interesting articles were there. Loved the sale papers for all the stores and made grocery shopping lists off of them.

Now its online news and Walmart pickup. lol

Yeah I really miss the columns by Jim Pfeiffer, John Cleary, and them. John once contacted me about writing for this site and let me tell you, not being able to pay him absolutely broke my heart. He was a great writer.

And like the Sunday paper, one onto best things about Thanksgiving was that newspaper loaded with all of the Black Friday deals. Not that I’d ever got deal with all that madness, but it was something you couldn’t resist looking at.

Half the reason we subscribe to Morning Times is to help support independent journalism. If someone can do that here in Chemung County, I’ll happily subscribe.