Community newspapers are becoming more and more of a lost art. Pittsburgh still has a few neighborhood-specific newspapers holding on, such as the “Northside Chronicle,” the “Homepage” in Hazelwood, the “Bulletin” in the area spanning Lawrenceville to Friendship and “Print” in the East Side.

But what about Downtown?

Curiously, the Golden Triangle has never had a newspaper specifically for news in just this area. Sure, you can read stories about what happens here in nearly every media outlet that serves the general Pittsburgh market, but you are not going to get the same level of close reporting that you would see in one of the neighborhood-specific newspapers previously mentioned.

The thing is, Downtown does have its own newspaper. How do we know that? Because you’re reading it right now.

While The Globe’s primary role is to serve our campus community by reporting on events that happen within the confines of our little piece of Downtown, along with wherever a campus event may be, we’ve always also had the responsibility of reporting on news that happens just slightly off campus too.

This isn’t a new thing for us. If you were to pick up an edition of The Globe from 2022, you’d find some Downtown-centric news. The same would be true if you were to pick up an edition from, say, 2008.

It’s important to note that we are still going to prioritize news and features that directly relate to our campus community. We would rather cover something like a campus art show involving students than cover an art show that just so happens to be Downtown. But in a perfect world, we would cover both.

Those of us in The Globe who live on campus, or at least live Downtown, are able to report on things that happen down here faster than other newspapers. We don’t have to travel far to find news; we can walk to it instead of having to get stuck in traffic while trying to race to a scene.

Whether you like it or not, there’s a lot happening here that deserves to be covered. It doesn’t just have to be when crime occurs or when a vacant building gets damaged. Our coverage can and should include news of upcoming changes, or what’s going on in this neighborhood that more people are starting to call home.

And it doesn’t stop at the news, either. While it’s preferred that student productions get top priority for arts and entertainment coverage, even reviews of a movie playing at the Harris theater or a show at the Byham should be included in these pages.

It is true that we call ourselves Point Park University’s weekly newspaper right below our newspaper’s masthead logo. But it is also true that the university’s messaging for years was the saying, “Pittsburgh is your campus.”

If that’s the case, then is covering as much as Downtown as possible still on-campus reporting? That’s up to you, but we’re going to maintain the tradition of showing what’s important – not just every single event on campus, newsworthy or not.