A few weeks ago I stopped by the offices of the Rock River Times. Illinois requires that anyone registering a Doing Business As (DBA) publish a legal notice in a local newspaper, so I was there on business. Zombie Logic Press had recently become an official Illinois business, and I needed to place the required advertisement. Since I happened to have a copy of Vanished Roads and a press kit with me, I asked if they might be interested in doing a story about the book or the press.
The editor's response was brief and matter-of-fact.
"We don't do much of that anymore."
I don't remember his exact tone, but I remember thinking later that he wasn't brushing me off. He was simply stating a reality. Curious, I picked up a recent issue of the paper, and it confirmed what he had said. The community features, arts coverage, and local profiles that once filled papers like this had become noticeably thinner. It wasn't difficult to see that something had changed.
That moment stayed with me because I couldn't help thinking about Frank Schier.
Frank founded the North End Times, which eventually became the Rock River Times, and I was fortunate enough to know him personally. Frank believed local newspapers existed to chronicle the life of a community. They covered neighborhood businesses, local artists, musicians, civic organizations, and the people trying to build something worthwhile in Rockford. Those stories mattered precisely because nobody else was going to tell them.
Unfortunately, this isn't simply a Rockford story. It's happening across America. Over the last two decades, local newspapers have lost an enormous percentage of their reporting staff. Thousands of newspapers have either closed entirely or operate today with only a fraction of the journalists they once employed. Communities large and small have become what researchers now call "news deserts," places where there simply aren't enough reporters left to cover the life of the town.
Rockford has not been immune to that trend.
The more I thought about my visit, the more I realized the editor's comment wasn't really about my book at all. If there are fewer reporters, there are naturally fewer stories. It's not that local authors suddenly became less interesting. It's that there are fewer people left whose job it is to discover them. The same could be said for local painters, musicians, nonprofit organizations, neighborhood businesses, and countless other people whose work once found its way into the pages of the community newspaper.
That loss extends beyond journalism. It affects memory.
I've spent much of this year digitizing nearly four decades of my own literary archives. As I've worked through boxes of journals, magazines, newspaper clippings, and correspondence, I've discovered just how easily history disappears. Many of the literary journals that published my work in the 1990s have little or no digital presence today. Some survive only in library collections. Others exist only because someone cared enough to keep a copy on a bookshelf. Without those physical artifacts, entire chapters of literary history would simply vanish.
Perhaps that's one reason I've become so committed to building digital archives. Every journal I catalog, every bibliography entry I create, every Internet Archive upload, every Library of Congress record, and every Wikidata page contributes, in its own small way, to preserving a record that might otherwise be lost. If traditional institutions no longer have the resources to document every local story, perhaps those of us creating the work also have a responsibility to preserve it.
I don't blame the Rock River Times for where it finds itself today. The paper is navigating the same economic realities that have reshaped local journalism across the country. Still, I couldn't help thinking about Frank Schier as I walked back to my car. I suspect he would have been saddened by what has happened to local reporting, but I also think he would have understood why preserving our community's stories has become more important than ever.
History doesn't disappear all at once. It fades one untold story at a time. If we care about the history of Rockford—its artists, writers, musicians, businesses, and neighborhoods—we may all have to become a little more intentional about preserving it ourselves.
