It’s Labor Day Weekend, the weekend I always confuse with Memorial Day, so the podcast is taking a break! I did, however, still post a sort of half-episode: the local news here in Columbia County as it was in the 1880s.

In researching for my upcoming Guide To The Many Chathams, I learned about the Hudson River Valley Heritage Historical Newspapers collection, a database of 90,612 issues of newspapers across the Hudson Valley (that’s 911,779 pages and 1,316,434 articles), from such papers as the Barrytown Explorer, Red Hook Journal, and Womanspeak.

It also includes issues of the Chatham Courier dating from 1862 to 1924. Among its many sections that you’ll find are All Sorts, Miscellany, Vicinity Items, Fashion Items, and of course Local News and Gossip.

There are so many good stories in these pages — like “A boy only four years old was found drunk in Albany, Saturday last week. In Schenectady, the same night, a 12-year-old lad was picked up so drunk that he had become utterly unconscious” — that I thought it would be fun to produce an episode for The Jiffy as if the Chatham Courier produced a daily headline news podcast.

You can find the episode below.

_{Watch out for the horse thieves,
James}

I'm excited to share that The Jiffy is part of the Back Indie Media Drive (that’s me on the top row, far right)! It’s a month-long campaign rallying support for independent publications that don’t answer to algorithms, ad networks, or billionaire VC funds.

Organized by Project C, this drive brings together a group of newsletters, podcasts, and studios (like mine), such as The Food Section, Continuous Wave, and Court Watch, that are built out of the need to tell important stories. We want to remind readers that indie media isn’t just viable, it’s the future.

If The Jiffy has ever taken you somewhere interesting, helped you understand your town in a new way, or made you just feel seen in the middle of a mud season meltdown — this is your moment to support it!

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Thanks for being here. And thanks for helping me continue to share these stories!