You may have noticed a central theme to many of the stories we published last week.
Starting last Wednesday, our five-day special series, Teens in Crisis, explored the mental health of our region’s young people.
We planned this project for the better part of a year, and our team of reporters spent months researching and writing the 24 articles that made the final package.
We’re proud of the end result, and we hope we’ve helped bring attention to the mental health problems our children face and provided some potential solutions.
If you missed any part of the series or want to reread it, all of the Teens in Crisis articles can be found together on our website at johnsoncitypress.com/news/teens-in-crisis/.
Large, in-depth packages like these take a lot of work to produce, but we’re glad to do it because our mission is to serve the community.
You won’t find local reporting as thorough as ours anywhere else. It’s what we do, and we do it well.
It also costs money to keep producing the community coverage you deserve, and that’s why we’ve made some changes lately to how we do business.
We’ve reduced the number of pages in our printed newspapers on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday to save costs, and we’ve started asking visitors to our website to pay for using the content we produce.
More and more people are preferring to consume media online instead of in print, but the lion’s share of ad revenue on the internet is being gobbled up by large companies like Google’s parent Alphabet and Facebook’s Meta.
Our other main source of direct income is subscriptions, so we’re now asking for a fee to read our online articles instead of giving them away for free.
Most people nowadays don’t bat an eye when paying subscription fees for multiple streaming services, but are so used to receiving free local news that the idea of paying for it seems outrageous.
There’s value in what we do, and we hope you’ll recognize that and become a subscriber, so we can continue to do it.
