Manchester Mirror celebrates a milestone in print

Early print edition of the Manchester Mirror showing the opening of the new Main Street Bridge from May of 2016.

They say time flies.

And it’s true.

This Wednesday, March 31, will mark the Manchester Mirror’s five-year anniversary of being a print newspaper. Five years ago, the staff of Sara and Fritz Swanson, Marsha Chartrand, Mike Austin, and Danielle Muntz, realized that although our online efforts were helping to inform and educate the community, there were many people who really wanted — and needed — a printed edition of the newspaper, particularly after the demise of Washtenaw Now, a successor to the Manchester Enterprise.

So, we decided to take the leap into printing thanks to the encouragement of the Manchester Wellness Coalition and 5 Healthy Towns, who committed to a year of weekly advertising that helped to fund our initial efforts. They believed in us and we are deeply indebted to them for their support.

We are also grateful to Matt and Kris Schepeler, and Lee Smith at the Brooklyn Exponent, who not only have supplied us with a reliable and top-notch printing job at least 255 times, but continue to patiently answer our questions (which have, at least, become a little less frequent in the ensuing years!) Their experience in small-town journalism has been a quiet but huge benefit to making us Manchester’s community newspaper. We also appreciate our partnership with Bridge Magazine, which allows us to delve into statewide news articles that affect Manchester as well as the wider community around Michigan.

Expanding the Mirror into print reaffirmed for us the need for a Manchester-based local newspaper. We hope through our dedication to staying hyper-local to the Manchester area, we can do our part in retaining Manchester’s identity as its own, self-sufficient community, as opposed to letting it be swallowed up and turned into “another Washtenaw County bedroom community.”

This effort has been a learning experience for all of us. We hope to continue to grow the paper, both in print and online. We expect to remain a free resource, but in order for that to happen we will need to expand our advertising base. When you have an event coming up, please consider purchasing an ad to support our business as we support yours.

Today’s Manchester Mirror staff of Sara and Fritz, Marsha, and current ad rep Jennifer Blackwell, would like to thank everyone that has supported this endeavor over the past five years — whether through purchasing display advertising, purchasing classified ads or other announcements, donating money, assisting with distribution, subscribing for loved ones, and/or voraciously reading the print paper every week! Each one of you has helped to contribute to our success, and you are appreciated.

Here’s to the next five!

For as little as $1 a month, you can keep Manchester-focused news coverage alive.

by Marsha Chartrand

Marsha Johnson Chartrand, a founder, writer, and copy editor with the Manchester Mirror, is a 50-year resident of Manchester. She has a long history of volunteer and community involvement.