This weekend you will notice a change in rrspin.com. Nothing major, just some good, old black and white photos and some columns about newspapers.

Why? October 3 through 9 is National Newspaper Week and we want to recognize how the news affects us, gives us vital information and is the connector to keep you informed.

Newspapers across the country have been hit hard by the economy in the last years. We’ve seen some fold, we’ve seen some go to online editions and we’ve seen some fight the economy and survive with the tenacity of a pit bull.

That’s why we encourage you to support newspapers, whether they are online or whether you buy them from a rack.

Many people mistakenly assume rrspin.com was born to hurt the competition. rrspin.com was born to provide an alternate news source. We several times last year offered to cooperate with the competition and we understand their reluctance to do so although we will renew that offer today.

Regardless of how you get your news, we want you informed and we believe formats like rrspin.com or the print news are your best value. We believe with newspapers, whether online or print, we best tell the story. With newspapers shrinking in size, online newspapers probably have a better advantage but, still, we think we beat the coverage given on radio and TV.

We think we understand the community better, we are persistent but not pushy, we don’t shove microphones in people’s faces or reduce the news to a few soundbites.

Many newspapers have tried a few tricks to adapt. Some put video on their websites or soundbites but we believe we need to do what we do best, write the stories, get comments and try to help the reader understand in words what is going on instead of thinking a couple of talking heads are going to give us a two-minute drill in the news.

Newspapers, whether print or online, take effort. They take effort from those who produce the news, in newspapers they take effort from the press people who end the day with ink spots on their arms and clothes and they take effort from people who sell the ads to support all those who work hard daily or weekly to keep the community informed.

We also believe the readers should make an effort to support newspapers by reading them, not just scanning headlines. The headline is often the TV news of the newspaper, something to hook the reader while the rest of the story is never seen.

We’re not dictating what you read because we know some stories aren’t relevant to the readers but we do encourage you on those stories to at least read a couple of paragraphs. You may find what another community is doing is something your community should be doing.

So, don’t be alarmed by the changes beginning Saturday in rrspin.com. We began our newspaper journey when the only color that mattered was black and white, when we didn’t have the luxury of computers with spellcheck, when we didn’t have Quark or InDesign or in our case, Joomla and the technical wizardry of Curry Roberts of the The Computer Guy and Company.

We remember processing our own film, writing headlines on odd looking machines and, not only creating the news, but pasting it by hand.

This may not be important to anyone but us but it’s a small way to recognize the contributions newspapers give to society and it’s our way to remember our roots — Editor.