Merry Christmas and thank you from ‘the Mirror‘ — looking ahead
by Sara Swanson, Fritz Swanson, and Marsha Chartrand
When we made the decision in 2022 to become a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it was with an eye toward the future and sustainability of the Manchester Mirror. We recognize that the Mirror needs to have a structure outside of just us if it is going to continue past our retirements. We also recognize that while we are willing to run the paper on a mostly volunteer basis, we need to build up revenue to the point that in the future, an editor can be hired in our place. This year we began taking steps in those directions!
In 2025 we started assembling a board, bringing in dedicated Mirror volunteers and article contributors. We put down our ethics policy, which up until this point lived in our heads, onto paper to hopefully guide future iterations of the Mirror after we are gone. And we have begun discussing ways to bring in more money (without charging for the paper, as we are committed to it always being free to read digitally and in print).
We are always trying to improve the quality of the Mirror’s current content as well as planning for the future, and always trying to bring in more volunteers and expand our coverage. We planned and held two open houses this year, one at the library and one at the Manchester Farmers Market. While neither produced the surplus of volunteers we were hoping for, it was very nice to talk to readers who stopped by in person and is probably something we will do again next year.
We have broken all of the steps of running and producing the paper into discrete jobs and we would be happy to have a volunteer step forward to pick up one or two. (If you read the Mirror in print you may have noticed that we highlighted different volunteer jobs every week this summer.) If you are interested in volunteering, email us. We promise there is something you can work on, whatever amount of time and/or skill set you have.
Something we always need everyone’s help with is to know what is going on in Manchester! The Mirror is a community newspaper. It is for the community but also most of our articles are things community members send in. If you are in an organization that is doing something neat, let us know! Award? New business? Crazy discovery on your property? Need volunteers? Someone do a good deed? Cool event? Let us know. You don’t need to be a writer; we can do the writing, we just need to know the details!
You may have noticed we did have more than a few new writers in July and August. This summer kindergarten through 4th grade Title 1 summer program students took educational field trips to community businesses to learn how reading and math were used in real world situations. The students then wrote short articles about the businesses they visited!
With the proliferation of AI over the past year it became necessary to establish an AI policy so we wrote one and you can read it in full on our website. The bottom line is that where it applies to creating a newspaper, we recognize that AI does have specific and limited usefulness (like in automatically transcribing recordings), but we will never use it to write articles or create images to go with articles, and we won’t knowingly run AI-written articles submitted to us.
Looking ahead to the rest of 2025, we have made the decision to take two weeks off instead of one. As a policy, we don’t produce an edition the week of Christmas, but on a trial basis this year, we are going to extend that for an extra week. We are making this decision for multiple reasons, first, because of how the dates fall and that we’d be returning in December instead of January; second, the post-Christmas edition is notoriously hard to fill because everything has been shut down for Christmas the week before. Even Bridge Michigan, which is where we get our state news, takes that time off, so we don’t usually even have state news to pull from. Lastly, it’s been a tough year and we need a little time off. We are still very dedicated to the Mirror, and we look forward to coming back in January refreshed and renewed.
We recognize that our print subscribers are paying to have a newspaper delivered that week so we have gone through and manually extended everyone’s subscription by a week. We also will continue to publish obituaries, public notices, and anything we receive that is time-sensitive online during those two weeks. This is an experiment and if it turns out two weeks is too long to go with no Mirror, we will revert back to one week off next year.
Looking ahead to next year, we will continue to try to bring in more volunteers, expand our coverage, and plan for the future to make sure the Mirror is sustainable and Manchester will continue to have a local newspaper well into the future. We will also be celebrating a milestone. In March of 2026 we will celebrate 10 years in print!
As always this time of year, we have a lot of people to thank!
Thank you to volunteers: Melissa Yekulis, Katy Hunshe, Colleen Schoenfeld, Melissa Licavoli, Allison Morris, Jessica Lash, Sybil Kolon, and Harker Jones, who has copyedited the Mirror twice a week for years. Thank you to our advertisers, subscribers, community members who submit write-ups for publication, those who write letters to the editor, and everyone who picks up a copy for their neighbor or drops off a few copies someplace we don’t. Thank you to our families who accept the significant percentage of our lives we put into this endeavor.
Thank you to everyone who donated in 2025 (note, some donors through Patreon only give their first names or a username so that is how it will be displayed here): Robin Scully, Kim Blumenstein, DeRuth Miles, Melissa Katke, Elizabeth Polk, Phyllis Heinrich, Doug Schneider, Jen Enzer, Patty Swaney, Jennifer Gaydosh, Peter Fuerstnau, Patty Havey, Amy Stevenson, Michelle, Carol Rose Kahn, Anita Herman, Kristen Uthus, Kindra Weid, Elayne Tiller, Jill Strait, Susan Havey, Daniella Kippnick, Melissa Andersen, Kenneth Frost, Wayne Oliver, Sharon Homolka, Carole and Christopher Barr, John Burton, Rick Walker, Brian Uhr, Leah Sweet, Harker Jones, Patricia K Vailliencourt, Sadira Clarke, Nancy Penberthy, Howard Girbach, Matt Callow, Julie Kruse, Virginia Johnson, Linda Breight, Jeff White, Della Smith, Michael J Ebersole, Evan Clark, Mark Ball, Carol Wotring, Sammie Martin, Colleen Schoenfeld, Anne Zsenyuk , Robin Smith, Denise Collins, Linda Uhr, Bob Kellum, Annette Siffin, John Hilton, Judy Fahey, Cathy G, Dave Kozyra, “conwaytwitty”, Kelly Scheu, Cheryl Beuning, Carol Buss, Paul Whelan, Rick Finger, Barbara Fuller, Anne Goulish, Joyce Priscilla Gipson, Margaret, Raymond Noellert, Curt Dettling, Russ Mason, Jean Nemacheck, Gary Smith, “aerialview”, Robert Dunn, Linda Easley, Brenda Baker, Sandra, Gayla Martin, Bob, Chuck Marshall, Ann J, Patrick J Schoen, Anne Marie Hanna, Page Caufield, Allison Morris, Bob Sparling, Jim Fish, David Haeussler, Jane Talcott, Christine krause, Sandy Smith, Reno & Nancy Feldkamp, Carol Westfall, David Duff, Barbara Schmid , M. Ava Goff, Patricia Swaney, Frances Sears, Ronald Burkhardt, Carol Westfall, Linda Mussio, Maureen Heslip, and George Daubner.
And thank you to all of our readers, we wouldn’t have a reason to exist without you.
Merry Christmas and we’ll be back in January!
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