I don’t drink coffee, and yet I’ve been wanting to write about Viennese coffeehouse culture for quite a while now, and even wrote the first paragraph a couple of months ago. Because Viennese coffeehouses are so different from your typical American cafe, and because their many different coffee drinks have really cool names, I thought exploring them with you, dear Reader, would be fun. However, I just found out that both the Derrick/News-Herald in Oil City/Franklin and the Clarion News will be shutting their doors for good, and so I want to take this sad opportunity to remind us readers of the critical role local papers play in our communities.

Newspapers everywhere, not just the Derrick/News-Herald and Clarion News, have been struggling with losing more and more readers. With our fixation on the digital world and its news feeds, we’ve forgotten how incredibly valuable and irreplaceable actual newspapers truly are. Shutting newspapers down not only means losing passionate journalists who put their hearts into them; it also means losing real community assets.

When I was in college I wanted to become a journalist and was really happy to land a summer job at an Austrian newspaper, and to then work at two different Austrian radio stations the following two summers. At the one radio station I even ended up staying for almost a year. A long time has passed since then, and in hindsight it was good I didn’t become a journalist. Being an excellent journalist is a calling rather than a mere job, and requires both total flexibility and sacrificing part of your personal life.

We readers typically don’t waste a thought on all the sweat, energy, and time that goes into composing a newspaper. My occasional 900-word contributions are nothing compared to what a journalist has to accomplish. I just sit down and write about whatever I like. I sometimes have to do some research, depending on the topic, but am generally completely flexible about what I include and how much work I put into my piece. Journalists, in contrast, are tied to events; have to drive to places, interview people, take photos, and research facts; and then have to write their stories as fast as possible to meet deadlines.

Writing under such extreme pressure is a skill I don’t have and greatly admire in journalists. My journalist friend, for example, is capable of miraculously writing four stories in one evening without having to revise them again and again. I have no clue how he does it. I certainly can’t pull it off. I write my first draft by hand. This can take days or weeks. Then I type it on the computer. Many times I find a lot of things to change. In addition, I always end up with too many words, which is a problem I’ve been carrying with me since my teenage years, and which was the reason why my German high school teacher never gave me an A. And there’s also always some concept, sentence, or expression I’m not content with, making me ponder at night what I could say instead.

When I wrote another opinion piece not long ago, I skipped writing a first draft by hand and typed my thoughts right on the computer in only one sitting. That had never happened before. There was one paragraph that troubled me though, and so I kept changing it. Thinking I was finally done, I sent the piece off. Big mistake. I need to have the “finished” version sit overnight and read it again the next day before sending it off, and I should have done the same with this piece.

My journalist friend found that paragraph confusing. So, I fixed it. — Well, “fixed” it. I still wasn’t content and “fixed” it again. And again. The editor of the Clarion News ended up receiving five or six versions of the text until I was finally content, and it’s beyond me why that poor guy didn’t hang himself…

In my Austrian hometown of Graz we have a free weekly community paper called “der Grazer,” which is delivered right to your door. When I’m in Graz, I like reading it because it informs me about the projects and problems going on in the different districts. For a while they didn’t deliver the paper, and frankly, it sucked. Sure, I read national newspapers too, and of course it’s important to know what’s going on nationally and internationally, but those papers don’t tell you what’s going on right in your community.

Because I’m not on social media, I don’t get news feeds like so many people who have abandoned their newspaper. But I know it’s extremely hard to navigate through a never-ending stream of information and to figure out what’s relevant and what’s true or fake. What we’re doing is actually the job of our journalists. They — not us — should be the ones selecting the news relevant to our community and ensuring the information is true.

Losing the Derrick/News-Herald and Clarion News thus means that these communities are losing irreplaceable quality information in a world of fake news and too much information. Lock Haven is fortunate to still have The Express. And it is my hope that we readers continue to support our journalists, who are so dedicated every day to providing our community with reliable, high-quality information.

Dr. Daniela Ribitsch, a native of Austria, is a resident of Lock Haven.