Editor’s note: While today’s edition of The Recorder marks the beginning of our 225th year as Franklin County’s local news source, we plan to celebrate our anniversary all year — with special publications and events, online, in print and in person. We’ll keep you posted as they come up because we want to include the entire community in these celebrations.
The Recorder celebrated its 200th birthday in 1992, between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement. And here we are 25 years later celebrating our 225th anniversary — covering stories of a resurgent Russia and attacks on NAFTA. In some ways, The Recorder is a constant in a changing world, and while it has changed in appearance and been published under different names over the decades, it certainly has continued this past quarter century to be one of Franklin County’s most enduring institutions.
For 225 years, news of vast changes in the world have flowed across the pages of The Recorder and its progenitors, as today’s staff and our predecessors have tried to execute the plan enunciated by the paper’s very first editor, a young Boston printer named Thomas Dickman, who promised in his first edition of the Impartial Intelligencer: “to make it the earliest informer of every important intelligence, whether foreign or domestic, and as serviceable as any publication subject to the same disadvantages.”
Clearly our mission hasn’t changed nor has our dedication to our readers.
What has changed in the past quarter century is the world’s media landscape, which expanded to the world wide web, a computer network that in 1992 was in its infancy and used mostly by geeks and university research labs.
Today, most newspapers consider themselves to be digital-first publications that provide breaking news with video and interactive elements on the web, while still providing depth and curation in traditional printed newspapers. The Recorder is no different as we ride the waves of change like rafters on the whitewater of the Deerfield River. Our mission is the same as it was in 1992 and in 1792, but we are adapting to a new cyber delivery system and storytelling format.
Just this month The Recorder created its first full-time online editor position, as we continue to move more deeply into online publishing. Because our commitment to quality content remains paramount, we have filled the new job with a local news veteran, Gregory Tyler, a Greenfield native who has worked as a reporter and editor in Franklin County for more than 15 years. He will help The Recorder tell Franklin County’s story, in words, photos and video, to our quickly growing online audience through Recorder.com and through social media.
Even in Franklin County, where many towns have lamented the lack of high-speed internet service, broadband will eventually penetrate practically every hilltown and hollow, and The Recorder will also be there to deliver the same in-depth reporting online that it has for centuries in print.
We consider ourselves stewards of this enterprise, which has covered our communities and news of the broader world since the time of George Washington. We are married to this corner of Massachusetts and its residents — our readers, our neighbors — and so, today’s staff and those that follow us will continue to meet Thomas Dickman’s goal laid out 225 years ago.