10 years in print! Preserving back editions of ‘The Manchester Mirror‘

Early print edition of the Manchester Mirror showing the opening of the new Main Street Bridge. This is a good example of the huge title type size and the very different flag and mast compared to today’s design! Mirror file photo.

by Sara Swanson

The Manchester Mirror has just reached 10 years in print! 

Although we started as a weekly online newspaper in October of 2013 and celebrated one 10-year anniversary in 2023, we have just crossed another milestone! It’s been 10 years since our first print edition, on March 30, 2016. And with a decade behind us, we’re taking steps to preserve our print editions for future local historians.

Though it might seem trivial in the present, articles about businesses opening and closing help historians pin down the streetscape at any given time. Honor rolls and graduation lists will help former students track down classmates. Obituaries are invaluable for people researching their family history. As we have had to go back through both old Enterprise articles and previous articles we’ve published numerous times in the course of looking up background information for an article, we are aware of the value of preserving this information.

We are approaching this in two ways, both by preserving the physical paper and the PDF versions of the physical paper. 

The physical paper is currently stored loose in boxes in chronological order. Within the next month or so, we’ll be cracking into the boxes and pulling out copies and assembling complete sets to be given to the Manchester District Library and Manchester Area Historical Society, either as loose copies or bound into books, their choice. We’ll also be opening up the opportunity to any organization or private local history collector who is interested in a complete set (of which we will have a limited number) to acquire one, as well as for anyone to request a specific back issue.

In addition we have organized and uploaded the PDF versions of the print editions and made them easily accessible by a link in the menu bar on our homepage. Click on “Back Issues” and find links to both the print versions of the Manchester Mirror and the digitized Manchester Enterprises, which we host for the Manchester District Library. 

Be warned, some PDFs are missing. The biggest number of missing PDFs is from mid August 2019 through April 2020, after which no editions are missing. While the PDFs are missing, we should have paper editions of those weeks so they are not totally lost, just not in PDF format.

It is also important to note that for the most part, every article we’ve published is on our website still, so you can still find and read individual articles by searching keywords in the search bar on the home page. In fact, this is the only format that articles from the first 2 1/2 years before we started the print editions exist in!

Looking through back editions in order to create the collection of PDFs revealed some fun facts about the print version of the Manchester Mirror:

• It took a while to standardize our title sizing! If you look back at the early editions, some headlines were huge and some were tiny. Today we use 24pt for single-column-width articles and 30pt for anything bigger. Back then we used smaller or much larger type sizes, whatever we needed to make the headline fit. These days we change the headline wording to fit the space.
• It was a full year before we added page numbers, the date, and the name of the paper at the top of each page. This coincided with beginning to publish public notices.
• We jumped between a 4-page and an 8-page paper, depending on the numbers of articles we had. We didn’t standardize to an 8-page paper until after we began syndicating Bridge Magazine (now called Bridge Michigan) in January of 2019, which gave us access to additional articles to fill out the extra pages on low-local-news weeks.
• Our flag has changed subtly over the decade with nine notable changes, including size, whether it includes the year we were established, the layout of the mast information, and, for a while there, the inclusion of a mask public service announcement.
• We haven’t raised our ad prices since 2016!

Thank you for your readership over the last 10 years. We couldn’t do this without you. Here is to 10 more!

First stack of print Manchester Mirrors, March 30, 2016. Mirror file photo.

Evolution of the Manchester Mirror flag over the first 10 years of print.

Left to right: Sara Swanson, new newspaper box, and Marsha Chartrand. Another big milestone in the life of the Mirror in print was when we acquired a newspaper box in March 2020, donated by the Brooklyn Exponent and painted by David and Marsha Chartrand. Mirror file photo.

by Sara Swanson

Sara Swanson is an editor, writer and a founder of the Manchester Mirror.