Celebrating 2 anniversaries

On Saturday Storm Lake joins the rest of the nation in celebrating the 250th birthday of the United States of America. It was on July 4, 1776, that our nation’s founders, meeting in Philadelphia, signed the Declaration of Independence, marking our freedom from the dictatorial king of England.

Around our Times Square office this week we also mark the 36th anniversary of the founding of The Storm Lake Times, a modest publication that has grown into one of America’s most respected community newspapers. We’re the smallest newspaper in America to achieve journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize, awarded to Art Cullen for his editorials 10 years ago.

The Times started as a crazy idea and blossomed into something grander. In our early days the owner of the competing newspaper walked into our office one day and informed us he would run us out of business. He had “deeper pockets,” he said. That’s something you don’t say to a couple of stubborn Irish brothers, and four years ago we finished the fight by buying the Pilot-Tribune and folding it into the Times. We may not have deep pockets, but we do have deep memories.

From our modest beginnings 36 years ago on June 29, 1990, in a 20 by 20 foot office 50 yards away on Michigan Street, we eventually built our Times Square office big enough to house our own newsprint-devouring newspaper press. We ran our own press for 26 years until our advancing age and the economies of printing convinced us it was time to let younger people with bigger presses print the paper at a new production plant in Sheldon. It has enabled us to concentrate our energy on reporting instead of replacing ink rollers, while filling our former pressroom with a lot of junk that should be thrown away.

Our history actually goes all the way back to the Storm Lake Pilot, the region’s first newspaper. It began chronicling the stories of this fledgling community in 1870, three years before Storm Lake was even incorporated. Newspapers were the main means of mass communication for more than a century until the iPhone gained acceptance about 15 years ago. As more people get their news from their cellphones, the Times Pilot — the oldest continuously operating business in Buena Vista County — has adapted and we now offer a complete news product online as well as in print. In fact, our website, stormlake.com, has more views each month than any other news site in Buena Vista County. More Storm Lakers get their news from the Times Pilot than from any other source.

This newspaper has been in the forefront of technology from the beginning. The Storm Lake Times was the first newspaper in Iowa to be composed entirely on computers, bypassing the antiquated and costly printing methods that newspapers had relied on for hundreds of years.

While technology has changed, our founding principles — published annually on the Editorial page that faces this — remain the same: to publish the truth and celebrate our community. And we remain committed to the ideal that if we fall short, we will correct our mistakes and redouble our efforts to get it right.

Publishers and democracy have worked side by side for our nation’s 250 years. You can’t have one without the other. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin were publishers and Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, was a fervent defender of freedom of the press and freedom of speech.

So we celebrate both this week. Happy birthday to the Storm Lake Times Pilot, and happy birthday America!