Working for Justice-Alpena started with the very basic idea that human rights are everyone’s rights, and we all need to be treated equally, as News Lifestyles Editor Darby Hinkley reported back in August. Started by Fresh Palate owner Eric Peterson and led by Fresh Palate server and ...

Alpena Community College is the hub of higher education for places like Metz, Posen, Lachine, Glennie, and Lincoln. When it comes to college athletes, you can often add other places around Michigan as well, places like Saginaw, Newberry, or Ludington. Those all I understand. But, for ...

“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but, if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” — Maya Angelou “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” — H.G. Wells Lining the back walls of The Alpena News newsroom and ...

Is this really where we have sunk to? The news of the FBI successfully infiltrating a Michigan terrorist organization and thwarting a plot to overthrow state government by kidnapping Gov. Gretchen Whitmer sounds more like a fictional best seller than it does a sobering reality slap in the ...

I love my son’s camera. My 14-year-old takes the most amazing pictures with his phone. He flips through filters and adjusts this and that, slaps on a lens, pokes the shutter button, and, hey-whaddya-know, he can make anything look like a work of art. Anything. The ceramic frog on the ...

Rose Butler — Miss Butler to me — was my first-grade teacher at Bingham school. She was one of those teachers who dedicated her life to teaching a thing or two to kids like me. Miss Butler taught me to read. She also taught me to print. Though I subsequently moved through a progression ...

Walk into a small-town diner during any fall in Northeast Michigan and one will invariably hear hunters discussing the population status of their favorite game species. How many whitetail deer are there? Have ruffed grouse numbers gone up or down? While such discussions are an easy way to ...

We love collaborations. Thus, it should come at no surprise that we are excited about the Presque Isle County Sesquicentennial Digitization Project that was announced this week. The project, which will preserve 150 years of information at the Presque Isle County Historical Museum, is a ...

A look at winners of the Pulitzer Prize in the past two years underscores why America needs journalists. It’s not just nationally recognized media giants pursuing stories around the globe that win journalism’s most prestigious honor. It’s news staffs that are digging out stories about ...

Hunting contributes some $8.9 billion to Michigan’s economy every year, according to a 2019 study commissioned by the Michigan United Conservation Clubs. Combined with fishing, some $11.2 billion flows into our economy and 171,000 jobs are created, according to the study. But, as we near ...

For decades, scholars across the country researched the effectiveness of state and local economic development programs in creating new jobs. The preponderance of evidence shows most are ineffective. Even when they create jobs, the costs of the fiscal incentives they present to ...

If there was a million dollars laying around, it would gladly be yours to keep, if you could name the eight members of the State Board of Education and the four candidates running for two seats on that illustrious body this November. Well, there is no million dollars, and there is nobody — ...

Sometimes, you can get so wrapped up in doing what you’ve always done that you’re blind to ideas that might make things better. That’s why it’s important for any operation to have a mix of veteran experience and youthful idealism. The young minds can bring in new ideas, and the ...

When I was a preteen, it was the first time I saw a U.S. president as a candidate or incumbent. I then lived in Owosso, Michigan. A locomotive rolled into the railway station with presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kennedy. He spoke from the rear passenger car’s platform. As the train ...

In the 2021 state budget recently approved, lawmakers funded an expansion of a program called 10 Cents a Meal for Michigan’s Kids and Farms to take the program statewide. It had been available only in limited Michigan counties. The program provides schools matching funds to buy fruits and ...

This week is National Newspaper Week. In honor of the occasion, News staff writers share what they love about their jobs. DARBY HINKLEY, NEWS LIFESTYLES EDITOR I became a journalist for a variety of reasons, but I’ll just bore you with the top three here. 1. I find people highly amusing. ...

If you happened to read the Albuquerque Journal recently you would have learned about a family who used their (galloping) goats to gobble up weeds and earn some extra money while keeping the city’s weeds and grass trimmed. In the Orlando Sentinel, you would have discovered that a man was ...

National Newspaper Week began Sunday and runs through Saturday. Occasionally throughout the week, The News will carry columns from editors and other newspaper officials from around the country — and from News staffers — talking about the importance of newspapers in everyday life. You’ll ...

The number-one question on children’s minds right now is what trick-or-treating is going to look like in a few weeks. Talking with my granddaughters last weekend, they shared their plans for the big night, including what they were dressing up like this year. While they were plotting and ...

“A press badge or even a notebook is coming to be a liability in the increasingly polarized atmosphere of these civil conflicts. Neutrality is obsolete. The question now, even for a journalist, is, ‘Which side are you on?’ In Chicago I was clubbed by police; In Washington I was menaced by ...