We love local news and we believe it is essential now more than ever.

The Journal Opinion is an independently owned, community weekly newspaper. Since we first started publishing in 1865, the newspaper’s name has changed. The people working under the banner have too.

But one thing has remained constant: We are the weekly source of local news for over 15 towns in the Upper Connecticut River Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire.

We report on local governments, business, arts, schools, and sports. We are a chronicle of the people and places that form the community we call home. But like at many newspapers across the country, our business model used to tell those stories no longer works.

To be sure, we still have tremendous support from local businesses.

Prior to the pandemic, we published honor rolls highlighting student achievement from a dozen area schools four times per year. Local small businesses just like us sponsored these pages. In June, we published senior pictures for the five local graduating high school classes. We could not have done that without our sponsors.

But the pandemic is as much a financial challenge for them as it is for us. Even as they reopen after months of dormancy for some, many local businesses are in no position to advertise. The loss of advertising revenue threatens our very existence and we cannot continue to rely on that support.

To help bridge the gap, we are turning to our readers. What can you do?

As always, you can subscribe or buy a gift subscription by calling us at (802) 222-5281 or at our website www.jonews.com. You can also advertise. You can place an ad celebrating family or accomplishments.

Now, we offer a new element to support your local newspaper. We are asking for tax-deductible donations to the Local Community News Fund of New England. With your support we can continue to publish and bring back some of the regular features such as town news columns and select board minutes that have been lost due to the pandemic. We hope to bring these back to our pages in the near future.

The staff of the Journal Opinion is small, and we rely on freelance reporters and photographers to help us cover a large geographic area. We also have two columnists that alternate weeks, and a former history teacher who does a column once a month highlighting life in this area from days gone by.

Your donations will continue to provide the “Good Local News!” that our readers expect to see on our pages.