With subjects ranging from small town politics to the impact the iPad is going to have on the print world, these pieces are generally pretty average for what my competition is going to end up being in this contest.

Each week I am faced with the same thing, “what am I going to write about that my readers are really going to care about?”

As you can probably see by the spareness of this blog over time that finding something to write about week in and week out is a bit of a challenge. Sometimes you find something and you knock it out of the park. Other times you write about the weather.

I’m tasked with writing a column each week. My goal for the paper is to always have something interesting to say. The problem is, finding that interesting thing that will spark a wider audience’s attention. While I can write about my love for cheesy teen drama television shows on this blog, it hardly fits as something that would be worth putting in print that could be read 30 years from now.

In the end I normally find something to write about. This week I wrote about a golf tournament that took place over the weekend. Was it an award winning caliber story? Oh my no. Will it put a smile on at least one person’s face? I sure hope so.

As a newspaper editor, working on three papers in southwest Minnesota; the subject of online news interests me greatly. Recently we launched three new online editions of our paper, all free to the reader. We’re still working on our online model and watching with great interest what others are doing.

Earlier this month the New York Times announced plans to begin charging for most of its online news content, starting shockwaves throughout the Newspaper industry. Sure it has been done in the past, the Wall Street Journal has been charging for years and many other publications charger for back issue content.

I have been in the midst of many newsroom meetings, discussions and debates about the merits of charging for online news content and at this point I see both sides of the coin. We have been offering this content for years now, conditioning readers to expect news content to be free.

There are many similarities to Napster in the late 1990s and the way news is handled today. When newspapers began limping their way online more than a decade ago no one truly knew what it meant to put news online. There was as much debate then as there is now. Today we’re faced with the decisions that were made back when newsprint started to go digital.

The genie is out of the bottle and it’s going to be near impossible to get it back in there, no matter how many wishes the industry makes.

Of course my analogy of illegally downloaded music through services like Napster and the newspaper industries decision to put its content online for free is somewhat false. Newspapers pretty much universally did it willingly. Where the similarities merge is the difficulty the newspaper industry faces, how do we demonstrate value in purchasing when similar, if not identical content is available freely to readers around the world?

Over the last decade the newspaper industry has seen a great shake up with publishing firms, newspapers and magazines folding, selling off and letting people go left and right. It’s a scary time to be in the print industry.

The unfortunate side effect of this comes in where news originates from. A large majority of good news reporting still comes from newspapers. Sure television and online bloggers are doing fine journalism, but the first stories almost always find their home in print.

As newspapers continue to close down around the U.S., smaller communities are going to begin to lose their voice. A few years ago I was involved in the coverage of a story in the small town of Cottonwood, Minnesota. Four children were killed in a bus accident that made headlines around the world.

It was covered on Fox News, CNN, the nightly news programs and countless blogs online. A large amount of that coverage originated from the newsroom I worked at. We were inundated with phone calls, requests and inquiries. The Marshall Independent newspaper is where that story grew and early reporting was done.

Would the Cottonwood bus crash have been covered if the Independent hadn’t been there? It’s a difficult question to answer, but many of the iconic images that helped tell the story would not exist.

I have heard the argument that bloggers can do as good a job as newspaper reporters. I don’t disagree with that, however most bloggers don’t have the same mandate that a community newspaper does. I don’t see many bloggers sitting in on RTR school board of Lake Benton City Council meetings. I don’t think that would change if those communities no longer had newspapers. Those meetings and events would go un-noticed.

This is where I admit that the majority of the news I consume comes from free online sources and even a number of blogs.

I am not attempting to change anyone’s mind on the subject. I still don’t know if charging for news online is a model that will work. I just hope people don’t dismiss the importance of newspapers in our world today. We’re still relevant and have our place. I just ask that you recognize that and support us during this difficult transitional period.