This week I am headed to Marshall, Minnesota, for some summer meetings of newspaper people.

There will be several meetings. One will be a meeting of the nine people on the current board of directors of the Minnesota Newspaper Association as well as several staff members of the association.

Another meeting will be of the group that is made up of all the (living) past presidents of the Minnesota Newspaper Association. A third meeting will be of the two groups meeting together.

The topics, of course, will all have to do with newspapers, specifically Minnesota newspapers. In all, about 40 people are expected to be in attendance, a lower number than usual.

Many of the past presidents are still busy folks. Many are retired, but some are still working at newspapers. Like me.

There is sure to be some discussions about some of the things happening in the newspaper world. Those include going digital, using AI or not, higher costs of printing and mailing, and of course, the loss of advertising due to Facebook, social media and many other ways of advertising these days.

The number of newspapers ceasing operation is always a discussion topic of course, as are different attacks on freedom of the press that are going on.

It is not all gloom and doom for the newspaper world, as there are many new innovations out there that make it possible for newspapers to continue operating and serving their communities.

Some weekly newspapers especially seem to have strong local support from readers and advertisers alike. That is pretty true for the Faribault County Register, for instance.

While some dailies have cut back on the number of issues they print in a week, thus no longer being a “daily” newspaper, and cut back on the number of pages they have, some weeklies are still doing a lot with each issue each week.

When I travel, I habitually pick up a copy of the local newspaper wherever I am. That includes just stopping for lunch or gassing up the car.

On a recent trip to Tennessee I picked up a copy of a weekly newspaper in Kentucky that was chock full of news of the county and also had a lot of ads, for Fathers Day, especially.

Then in Chattanooga I saw a copy of the Sunday Chattanooga Times-FreePress, and I was blown away.

It was huge. You know how dailies are composed of sections to the newspaper? Usually section A is news, section B is features and section C is sports?

Well, the Sunday Chattanooga Times-FreePress had a section A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H. They were devoted to local news, area news, national news, opinions, sports, real estate and a whole lot else.

It was massive. It reminded me of the Denver Post in the late 1960s when I was one of its paper boys.

The Denver Post was an afternoon delivery newspaper back then, and I did the delivery of it after school. But on Sunday it was a morning paper and it was huge with many sections.

My brothers and I got up at 4 a.m. just to put it together and deliver it. While we did it on bikes during the week, my dad sometimes took us on Sundays in a truck, because the papers were way too big to put in our canvas bags that hung from our handlebars in the front and our fenders in the back.

I am not positive the Denver Post is still being printed. I know it combined with its competition, the Rocky Mountain News a while ago, and has had some financial issues. I believe the Rocky Mountain News is long gone.

It is a different world for newspapers these days. People can get their news from TV, the Internet, Facebook, Google or a whole lot of other “news services.”

Or they don’t pay attention to the news anywhere. Not national news, state news or local news. I have a term for those people – they are blissfully unaware. They live in a city or town and don’t know what is going on and don’t really care that they don’t know. And they don’t read a newspaper or watch TV news so they only know what is going in the world from someone telling them.

Yes, the world of newspapers has changed a lot in the last 50 years, but then, the world itself has changed a whole lot in the past 50 years.

Some of that change is for the good. Some is not. And some of the changes we have yet to see if they are going to turn out to be for the good, or be bad.

In the meantime, we once again want to say, ‘thanks for reading us.’