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1 week ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
Two weeks ago in this column, I wrote about a group of kids on Long Island who have started a newspaper called The Ditch Weekly, which was described by its 17-year-old chief financial officer as “very profitable.” The story, in the New York Times, was a quirky but welcome bit of positive reporting about the newspaper business, which remains chronically troubled.
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2 weeks ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
The alert about a last-minute concert at the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House came too late for an announcement in the newspaper. Jennifer Shannon, president of the congregation, emailed on Friday night to say that the Harvard University Choir would be singing on Wednesday afternoon. The students and their conductor, Edward Elwyn Jones, were supposed to have been in Copenhagen, Denmark for a long-planned end-of-semester concert tour.
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3 weeks ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
Every summer, the Provincetown Independent, with funding from the Local Journalism Project, welcomes four college students who spend 10 weeks researching and writing articles for the newspaper. This summer’s group starts work on Monday. Their hometowns are Austin, Texas, Pennington, N.J., Vestal, N.Y., and Waterloo, Ontario.
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1 month ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
When we were researching the idea of launching the Independent, one big question was whether the Outer Cape economy was strong enough to support a newspaper. We had looked across the country for examples and learned that in communities where Main Street was deserted and storefronts were empty, formerly thriving newspapers were among the casualties. Where towns were humming, however, and the local paper did its job, there was reason for optimism. Our local economy is admittedly weird.
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1 month ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
“Please cancel my subscription,” a reader wrote to us the other day. “We subscribed to your paper to get the local news from the Outer Cape, but lately it seems to be all politics, all the time. We subscribe to multiple newspapers and get more than our fill of political vitriol, anger, and downright hatred.
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1 month ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
Words matter to us in this line of work. Maybe we don’t always choose just the right ones, but we spend a lot of time worrying over them. When writers try out new words on us, editors will ask, “What does this mean?”And so, we are struggling to parse the language of this new government. On Jan.
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1 month ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
All our towns have now navigated through another annual town meeting cycle, and it’s worth stopping to consider the significance of this peculiar New England tradition. Wellfleet Town Moderator Dan Silverman provided a helpful lesson when, during last week’s debate over the development of housing at Maurice’s Campground, he admonished people in the audience for booing one of the speakers. “You do not boo speakers,” Silverman said.
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1 month ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
Conservative columnist David French writes in the New York Times this week that he has “a complicated relationship with Harvard.” So do I. French grew up in a small town in Kentucky and went to Christian schools, then to Harvard Law. As an evangelical, he found the law school’s atmosphere unwelcoming. Harvard “has maintained one of the least tolerant cultures in American higher education,” he writes. Still, he admits, the law school set him on a great career.
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2 months ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
At first it seemed that if this experiment in authoritarianism was going to break our hearts, we’d somehow stand firm. Now it’s pillaging our very minds. The National Science Foundation last week canceled hundreds of grants to researchers studying the spread of disinformation online.
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2 months ago | 
provincetownindependent.org | Edward Miller
“America is now divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution.” As the New Yorker’s David Remnick points out, that’s from the opening paragraph of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the “mandate for leadership” that is guiding the current dismantling of our government. Reading through last week’s Independent, I had a hard time figuring out which of those two camps the people we wrote about were members of.
