Good journalism is not glamorous. It’s not sexy

There used to be 324 newspapers in the state of Pennsylvania.

Today, there are about 60 dailies, give or take a few.

The Pennsylvania Gazette is the first one on record not just in the colony of Pennsylvania but in all of the British crown’s colonies. Benjamin Franklin bought the paper with a partner in 1729, and he contributed to it as well, mostly under aliases.

Among the many firsts the plucky paper would print was the first political cartoon in America, “Join, or Die,” authored by Franklin. It also printed the then-treasonous texts of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and the Federalist Papers.

It was bold. It was brash. It was opinionated. And it served its readers well.

Here in West Newton, only ghosts remain of its once “esteemed” Times-Sun; its first office along the railroad tracks carries only a faint trace of its existence on the side of the building.

When owner James Quigley Waters Jr. died in 1930 after running the paper for 34 years, local papers noted it widely. When it was forced to close that location nine years later, it was noted only by an ad in the Pittsburgh Press for the sale of the Times-Sun building and its presses.

Several decades later, the Times-Sun existed as a weekly. All print ended in 2015, and all that is left now is a shuttered office on Main Street.

There rarely is a proper obituary for old newspapers, nothing to chronicle their coverage of town events: how the school board was caught in a corruption sting; how a local politician was caught taking cash in a bag; and how the town rallied when flood waters crested the banks of the Youghiogheny or when the train derailed.

It just dies.

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