Check out the Slatington News Project website, which is based on some fragments of my home town newspaper from 1907. Slatington is located in Lehigh County in eastern Pennsylvania about sixty miles north of Philadelphia.
The newspaper was a weekly published on Wednesdays or Fridays from 1868 until sometime in the 1980s. The earliest issues that I have seen have mostly coverage of international, national and state affairs with relatively little coverage of town news, except for church services and a short gossip column (and no obituaries). By the 1920s there was a lot more coverage of town and personal events at the expense of national/international news--probably because other daily newspapers in the Lehigh Valley area were then covering that kind of news. By 1980s the news was almost exclusively town news. It was just four pages when it started, reached 8 pages by 1920, and then dropped back in size again. There were always ads which are very interesting.
There are two possible assignments that you can choose from this week.
Option 1: Submit the paper assignment as described on the Slatington News Project website.
Option 2: Read my notes for this week; check out the Slatington News Project website, and then comment in a long post on your blog about my idea of the real and non-real on the web, and in the digital world generally speaking.