Morning Reads for Tuesday, March 24

Good morning! It’s official: the 2020 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games are postponed until 2021.

• The Georgia tax filing deadline was postponed to July 15, 2020 (the same date as the federal filing deadline).
• Rome is one of many cities in Georgia that issued a shelter-in-place order. Floyd County will likely follow suit.
• The Farm Bureau is working on aid for farmers in Georgia.
• Five out of Georgia’s eight Supreme Court Justices have recused themselves from hearing appeals related to the open (or not) seat on their bench.
• March traffic in the Port of Savannah is expected to be down 20% from where it was last March.
• What can we learn from traffic data that we have as a result of the pandemic?

Local daily and weekly newspapers are suffering greatly, and many dedicated and professional local journalists were laid off in the past week. I occasionally receive complaints that I post too many articles that are behind a paywall. I always reply, “Perhaps you should consider paying for the journalism you consume.”

As a society, we are demonstrably worse off when we don’t have local journalists, whether they cover the high school sports beat or the Planning & Zoning board meeting. There’s a cost to these layoffs and there is a cost when these papers limit their scope and coverage to national of major metro wire stories. Like, an actual cost, to you, the taxpayer. So yes, once again, pay for the journalism you consume.

I don’t mean that you should be smug about your subscriptions to the major-major dailies like the New York Times and the WaPo, and even the AJC, much as I treasure the print edition I receive each morning. I am talking about The Brunswick News, the Albany Herald, the Rome News-Tribune, the Gainesville Times, the Marietta Daily Journal, the Statesboro Herald, to name a few. Those are the newspapers that are critical to our communities throughout Georgia, and if you are civic-minded enough to read this website, you are probably a sharp enough critical thinker to understand why you need to support local journalism.