Author Archives: smr1086

by - 0 comments

Salena Zito: All news is local

WEST NEWTON, PA — There used to 324 newspapers in the state of Pennsylvania.

Today, there are about 60 – give or take a few.

The Pennsylvania Gazette is the first one on record not just in the colony of Pennsylvania but in all of the Crown’s colonies — Benjamin Franklin bought the paper with a partner in 1729 – he contributed to it as well, mostly under aliases.

Among the many firsts the plucky paper would print was the first political cartoon in America, “Join, or Die,” authored by Franklin. It also printed the then-treasonous texts of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” and the Federalist Papers.

It was bold, it was brash, it was opinionated, and it served its readers well.

Here in West Newton, only ghosts remain of its once ‘esteemed’ Times Sun; their first building along the railroad tracks only carries a faint trace of its existence on the side of the building. When the owner James Quigley Waters Jr. died in 1930 after running the paper for 34 years, local papers noted it widely — when it was forced to close that location nine years later, only a want-ad notice ran in the Pittsburgh Press for the sale of the building and its presses.

Read the full story HERE.

by - 0 comments

The creators that also destroy

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Mike Juhasz is nothing short of the classic American Renaissance man; the 32-year-old grandson of a tool and die worker who lost two of his fingers to a press, he began adulthood working in manufacturing. Ten years later he still is, only now with high-technology that promises to reinvent manufacturing and bring skills and jobs to a Rust Belt city he calls home.

“This isn’t the kind of job creator that will place thousands of jobs all in one place like the old days, but it does place Youngstown on the cutting age of high-tech manufacturing 40 years after it all started to fall apart,” Juhasz said.

The imposing young man has his chestnut hair pulled back into a ponytail, he physically resembles a man who would prefer to get his hands dirty more than a man who wants to intellectualize quantum physics.

He does both.

Read the full story HERE.