For months, while continuing to provide the free news, information and interviews with local people on which our community has come to rely, we have been laying the groundwork for an ambitious redefinition and possible expansion of our operations.

On Aug. 27, we took the first step, unveiling our rebrand from the Canby Now Podcast to a fully fledged digital news company consisting of The Canby Current, Now Hear This: Canby and CanbyFirst.com.

And, there’s more.

It is not our intention for The Canby Current to remain a digital-only newspaper. That’s right, we plan to do something that hasn't been done since 1906: launch a print newspaper in Canby, Oregon.

While many small-town newspapers today have allowed themselves to become stale, outdated, out-of-touch and irrelevant, The Canby Current will be the counterargument, with fresh and thoughtful design, meaningful stories and advertising, respect for our area’s history and traditions and a heavy reliance on community voices.

Our management will be informed and guided by readers and the community. To preserve balance and restore confidence in local news, we will establish a Community Editorial Board and Steering Committee, a diverse group of engaged community members with direct access to our news staff, committed to ensuring the work that they produce is as fair, accurate, culturally sensitive and comprehensive as possible.

In addition to the news, our paper will offer community columns, local history, fiction and poetry, art, comics, crosswords and other puzzles, kids’ activities, always-free obituaries, births and other announcements, an event calendar and much more.

We even plan to bring back kid carriers. We may be taking a 21st-century approach in most ways, but this nostalgic throwback to a simpler time is something we are very serious about reintroducing to the local news ecosystem.

And through a creative partnership with local sports organizations, we plan on doing so in a way that is not only more secure, more reliable and more fun — but also one that gives back to Canby athletics in a time when their fundraising efforts have been severely curtailed.

To make that happen, however, we need your help.

For over two years, we have provided a free service to our community. On a shoestring budget, we have presented a product that we believe has consistently outshone our competitors in terms of timeliness, breadth, accuracy and balance.

We believe that local news is dying, not because it is not needed or people are not willing to support it, but because the means of creating are so often outdated and burdened with overhead that no longer makes sense in the modern world.

We have shown that with passion, drive and a little know-how, you can produce high-quality local news — without a publisher, general manager and editor-in-chief standing between journalists and the readers they serve.

Our revenue will not go to middle managers or corporate owners. It will go to the only thing we have ever spent money on: operations and equipment. It will go, eventually, to bringing back good jobs for reporters and photographers, chronicling life in Canby as only people invested in the community can.

At the same time, we have no desire to make the news a luxury item. We don’t believe in paywalls, period. When we launch, the Current will be available for free in many partnering businesses and neighborhoods, in stylish racks designed with the help of local graphic and custom-building experts.

But for those who can, we do ask that you please subscribe to our print edition. Even with our extremely lean approach, a print newspaper represents a roughly tenfold increase for our monthly overhead. Your support is the only way it will be possible. OK