By Greg Chandler
Zeeland Record
This week is National Newspaper Week – a weeklong promotion of the newspaper industry in North America.
It is an opportunity for us here at The Zeeland Record to share with you why this matters.
Since 1893, when Adrian Van Koevering started The Record, this newspaper has been all about telling the story of this great community – its people, its businesses, its organizations. We have covered the exciting community events, and we have covered the mundane, but important stories about how your tax dollars are being spent.
Since I became editor of The Record in January of 2025, we have had a front-row seat to many of the top stories that people in the community have discussed over their morning coffee.
We have followed the twists and turns of a worldwide company wanting to build a large-scale solar energy project in our community. We sat through countless hearings when one of the city’s largest employers wanted to move ahead with a massive modernization project that has changed the character of the surrounding neighborhood, but also preserved hundreds of local good-paying jobs.
We have also captured the sights and sounds of community events – such as Pumpkinfest last weekend, the annual Memorial Day parade and service, the annual Christmas parade, the Zeeland Zoom 5K, among other noteworthy happenings. We have shared the story of local public schools and their amazing teachers and students. We have highlighted the athletic exploits of the Chix and Dux – on the field, in the pool, on the court. We
have reported on national champion athletes who call Zeeland home.
What if, all of a sudden, we disappeared? Who would cover the news of this community?
I came to this community more than 35 years ago when there was robust competition in journalism. In addition to The Record, you had daily newspapers whose boots were on the ground in town, and you had a vibrant local radio station reporting on Zeeland news.
Today, The Record is the only media outlet with regular day-to-day coverage of Zeeland city and Zeeland Township news. Other competing outlets have had their staffs trimmed to bare bones – they still do great work – but they’re not at every City Council or Township Board meeting.
You may have seen the story several weeks ago when MLive, the statewide news service that oversees such publications as The Grand Rapids Press, announced that it would cease publishing its print editions at the end of the year, going fully digital.
I understand the move, and I grieve it.
I think there is value in holding a physical copy of your local newspaper in your hand as you sit over at Drip or La Crème or Community Restaurant or in the reading area of Howard Miller Library. I believe there is greater retention of the content, as opposed to looking at something on a computer screen or your cell phone.
Perhaps that makes me a dinosaur, or maybe Don Quixote tilting at windmills, yearning for a time that is passing away.
But if we went away, who would fill the information vacuum? I don’t believe competing newspapers based in other cities can do the day-to-day grind of reporting Zeeland news. It’s unreasonable for television to fill the gap – they have a much wider reach of communities to cover, so they’re only going to come to Zeeland when there’s a big story.
Facebook? Where does Facebook get the news content – oh yeah, they get it from us. They don’t have journalists.
And I hesitate to bring up the 800-pound (and growing) gorilla known as AI. ChatGPT or Gemini can’t show up at a City Council meeting or the Bird Bowl. There is something about an actual human being, a trained professional journalist, witnessing an event and writing it all down for publication.
If you subscribe to The Zeeland Record – thank you, thank you, thank you! Thank you for investing your time (and your subscription dollars) into our product. And please let others in the community know that there is a real product that provides accurate, fact-based reporting of the top stories – and the fun little features – of this community that we all love. Encourage them to purchase a subscription – the weekly cost is far less than paying for a cup of coffee.
Local Journalism Matters. More than ever before.
Zeeland Record
This week is National Newspaper Week – a weeklong promotion of the newspaper industry in North America.
It is an opportunity for us here at The Zeeland Record to share with you why this matters.
Since 1893, when Adrian Van Koevering started The Record, this newspaper has been all about telling the story of this great community – its people, its businesses, its organizations. We have covered the exciting community events, and we have covered the mundane, but important stories about how your tax dollars are being spent.
Since I became editor of The Record in January of 2025, we have had a front-row seat to many of the top stories that people in the community have discussed over their morning coffee.
We have followed the twists and turns of a worldwide company wanting to build a large-scale solar energy project in our community. We sat through countless hearings when one of the city’s largest employers wanted to move ahead with a massive modernization project that has changed the character of the surrounding neighborhood, but also preserved hundreds of local good-paying jobs.
We have also captured the sights and sounds of community events – such as Pumpkinfest last weekend, the annual Memorial Day parade and service, the annual Christmas parade, the Zeeland Zoom 5K, among other noteworthy happenings. We have shared the story of local public schools and their amazing teachers and students. We have highlighted the athletic exploits of the Chix and Dux – on the field, in the pool, on the court. We
have reported on national champion athletes who call Zeeland home.
What if, all of a sudden, we disappeared? Who would cover the news of this community?
I came to this community more than 35 years ago when there was robust competition in journalism. In addition to The Record, you had daily newspapers whose boots were on the ground in town, and you had a vibrant local radio station reporting on Zeeland news.
Today, The Record is the only media outlet with regular day-to-day coverage of Zeeland city and Zeeland Township news. Other competing outlets have had their staffs trimmed to bare bones – they still do great work – but they’re not at every City Council or Township Board meeting.
You may have seen the story several weeks ago when MLive, the statewide news service that oversees such publications as The Grand Rapids Press, announced that it would cease publishing its print editions at the end of the year, going fully digital.
I understand the move, and I grieve it.
I think there is value in holding a physical copy of your local newspaper in your hand as you sit over at Drip or La Crème or Community Restaurant or in the reading area of Howard Miller Library. I believe there is greater retention of the content, as opposed to looking at something on a computer screen or your cell phone.
Perhaps that makes me a dinosaur, or maybe Don Quixote tilting at windmills, yearning for a time that is passing away.
But if we went away, who would fill the information vacuum? I don’t believe competing newspapers based in other cities can do the day-to-day grind of reporting Zeeland news. It’s unreasonable for television to fill the gap – they have a much wider reach of communities to cover, so they’re only going to come to Zeeland when there’s a big story.
Facebook? Where does Facebook get the news content – oh yeah, they get it from us. They don’t have journalists.
And I hesitate to bring up the 800-pound (and growing) gorilla known as AI. ChatGPT or Gemini can’t show up at a City Council meeting or the Bird Bowl. There is something about an actual human being, a trained professional journalist, witnessing an event and writing it all down for publication.
If you subscribe to The Zeeland Record – thank you, thank you, thank you! Thank you for investing your time (and your subscription dollars) into our product. And please let others in the community know that there is a real product that provides accurate, fact-based reporting of the top stories – and the fun little features – of this community that we all love. Encourage them to purchase a subscription – the weekly cost is far less than paying for a cup of coffee.
Local Journalism Matters. More than ever before.
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