Community considers future of its hometown newspaper

Dell Deaton
Contributing Writer
Some 70 people gathered at the downtown library May 7 for “a meeting about keeping your local newspaper.” It’s a challenge that has two big parts.
The opening ante is financial. Doug Peters is a retired attorney and a volunteer consultant to the Belleville-Area Independent on this matter. He calculated that “$135,000 is what we spent last year. I expect that we need at least $100,000 to $175,000 [on top of that] to operate at the same level, with new people.”
In May of 2025, Editor Emeritus Rosemary K. Otzman and Advertising Manager Janet Millard filed with the State of Michigan to create the “Belleville Area Newspaper Foundation,” a domestic nonprofit corporation. Bryon Kelley, Elena Manalp, Barbara Miller, Sharon Peters, and Harry Van Gelder have since joined them to begin formation of a requisite oversight board.
Through year-end, they focused on securing 501(c)3 status, which gives access to grant funding. Ownership of the newspaper is transferring to that foundation, with no money having changed hands, making it in effect a donation — which is permitted by law.
As the potential of what that could mean begins to unfold, the question of should this newspaper even continue at all moved to the center of the formal program on May 7. This second big part of the challenge at-hand was introduced by Elena Manalp in a guest editorial published earlier that day in the Independent.
“This paper brings together our three communities and gives them a shared identity,” she wrote. At the meeting itself, both Belleville Mayor Ken Voight, in absentia, and Van Buren Township Supervisor Kevin McNamara added municipal-voice encouragements to that assertion, each aiming to include Sumpter Township as an indispensable part of the tri-community.
Acting as meeting host, Harry Van Gelder introduced the feature speaker, Hayg Oshagan of Wayne State University.
Building upon what had been shared by elected officials, he cited research into recent closures of local papers in Seattle and Denver. Data pointed to direct correlations with “less people joining the PTA, less neighborhood watches, [and] less active civic organizations,” he said. “A paper isn’t just ‘reporting’ on things, it’s creating community engagement.”
On top of that, when newspapers go under, “corporate violations go up, too — by something like 10 to 15%, in just raw numbers of dollars, whether it’s air pollution, or whether it’s corporate malfeasance. Even if the paper is not doing investigative reporting, just the mere presence of a paper in a community makes [businesses] a little bit more careful about doing things the way they should be done.”
He framed this as “identity based on place ….
“The alternative — when you don’t have a paper — is ‘group’ identity. ‘I belong to this group’ or ‘I belong to that group.’ Group identity is much more polarizing. Because people reject ‘other groups.’ But identity based on where we live unites people. We’re all somehow similar, even if our groups are different — even if our races are different, even if our genders are different, our economic class is different — we’re all from here.
“You take that away, and people no longer see what the rest of Belleville is doing, and they no longer feel part of a broad community, and people begin to become part of their own ‘in-group.’ That leads to polarization, and we’ve seen [where that leads elsewhere] in America.”
The authority of his assessments was underpinned by the fact that Dr. Oshagan is also founder and chair of New Media Michigan. Its mission is to raise visibility and strengthen ethnic media throughout the Great Lakes State: In other words, constituencies based on group identities.
At the close of that presentation, the floor was opened to discussion. From his seat among those in the audience, Doug Peters offered “to share a little more information” on Belleville-Area Independent operations week to week. The “paper has been subsidized by Rosemary [and] I think the transition period is going to be difficult, because the paper has not built-up resources.”
As the meeting wound to a close, several other voices in the room variously asked about the viability of pursuing mandates or protections out of Lansing in support of surviving local media. References were made to subsidies along the lines of the “California Civic Media Program.”
Dr. Oshagan discouraged such wishes, saying it takes a strong political push to accomplish. “Whatever else that could come, this newspaper still has to run like a business.”