We will make it through together

This is not a blizzard.

When the COVID-19 story started to become increasingly real in America, I first tended to think of it in blizzard terms.

You know, there’s a big event over a period of a handful of days, then it trails away, melts and we all move on. Kids go back to school. And we all trade stories while we settle into our old, familiar routines.

That’s the way it felt when things started disappearing from supermarket shelves.

It was unsettling, but there was a feeling we’d been down this path before.

That feeling is long gone.

This is not a blizzard.

It’s more like a siege. Sometimes it’s more like a war.

And it has transformed the newspaper you hold in your hands — or the downloaded PDF of the newspaper you are reading on your computer screen.

With a blizzard, newspaper coverage was pretty straightforward: Cover the event from every angle you can think of, then start looking for interesting feature stories about friends and neighbors who had gone through the same storm.

And that was that.

This is not a blizzard.

Instead, coverage of the virus itself and all its myriad of implications continues daily. The storm has not passed. We’re not even sure if the worst of the storm has yet arrived.

My friend Andy in California quoted a woman in his weekly column who summed the uncertainty up perfectly: “Nobody knows and everybody knows that nobody knows.”

So, still in the midst of the maelstrom, the story assignments keep coming. For every one that’s checked off, two or three more appear. And they’ll continue to appear when those stories are done as well.

We’ll get to them, but sometimes life feels like those scenes in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” when Mickey Mouse struggles with all those mops and buckets of water.

Meanwhile, the underpinnings of community journalism have taken a hit.

It’s understandable that advertising has fallen off.

It’s hard to do business when folks are staying at home to flatten the curve of COVID-19’s advance.

But local news has shrunk as well.

Much of what any community newspaper covers involves community gatherings: Basketball games, public hearings, festivals, government meetings and all that.

COVID-19 erased them.

The Community Calendar on the Family page of The CR has been put on hiatus because virtually all of those groups are not meeting. The church page has been given a vacation because most churches aren’t meeting.

There’s even been an impact on the police report. With fewer people out and about, fewer people are colliding their cars into one another.

The shorter version of all this: We’re in for the long haul.

We know it’s not a blizzard but a siege.

We’ll do our best to keep up with that ongoing flood of story ideas and assignments.

We’ll bring back the Community Calendar and the church page when events begin to return to normal.

Like you, we’ll look forward to coverage of local sports again.

We might even enjoy reading about local traffic accidents, as long as they’re not ours.

But here’s the thing: For a community newspaper to survive when a pandemic has taken a huge toll on local businesses and local advertising, your subscription is more important than ever. During this period of pandemic, we have removed the paywall from the newspaper’s website, thecr.com, but that’s only a temporary measure.

If you’re not a subscriber, become one. If you are, renew your subscription to the best of your ability.

Together, we’ll get through.

We’ve survived blizzards, and we’ll survive this.

Together.