First, I saw it mentioned in the print edition of World Magazine.
Then I saw a Google Alert link to it at the Los Angeles Times.
No, no, no! Not the federal budget. The Budget.
We used to “take” the Budget. I bought Ruby a one-year subscription several years ago. She enjoyed using it to catch up on old friends from Bible School days. Maybe I should teach her how to use Facebook as a less-expensive substitute.
Well, anyway. Here’s a bit from the LA Times piece:
For the Amish, newspapers are in no danger
With online competitors posing no threat, the Budget holds steady, linking communities with news about new silos, tomato blight and neighbors who’ve been kicked by a horse.
[…]
The Budget is not your typical newspaper. Since 1890, it has served as the primary communication link among Amish settlements across the country.
And at a time when papers big and small are struggling amid plummeting circulation and intense online competition, the Budget is holding steady. The vast majority of the paper’s reporters — called scribes — are Amish and Mennonite volunteers, hundreds of men and women who send handwritten dispatches in from rural outposts. Their only payment is a free subscription, worth $42 a year.
I should see if they need a scribe from Yoder, Oregon. Maybe I could pen a weekly report as a handwritten dispatch from our rural outpost. That’d be pretty neat.
“This is news we care about, and it comes fast enough for us.”
That sounds kinda revolutionary these days.
(OK, OK — they do have a Web site: The Budget.) 😯
Our church already has a scribe. I remember the first time I found out we were mentioned in the Budget, I felt so honoured. 😛 Then to knock me off my pedestal, when she wrote of our baptism, they mis-spelled our last name.