One week to go.

You may not know that Election Day is one week away and it is understandable. It’s not like there’s been a lot of coverage in the media; more on that later. But these are tough times and frankly, an election might be the last thing crossing people’s minds right now.

Recently, I saw a government estimate that roughly 21 percent of working age people are either unemployed or working just part time while wanting a full-time job. That’s one in five people in our country. And with Pennsylvania lagging the rest of the country in terms of economic recovery, that number could be worse here.

So, it would be understandable if people were more interested in watching Dancing With the Stars — not to mention the upcoming World Series and the Phillies — than reading the news. Everyone deserves a break from what has seemed like little more than bad news bracketed by the endless bickering between the political parties, more driven by scoring political points than solving problems.

But I remain shocked at the number of people who don’t seem to know we have an election on Nov. 3. Many are better informed of the New Jersey gubernatorial race than of the elections in their own county, school district and township or borough. It’s not a new problem: voting has been declining in these off-year elections for decades.

That means a very few people, those who vote in these off-year elections, get to decide virtually everything about your local real estate tax bill. They get to decide how your children will be educated, how or if your street will be paved and whether open space will be protected. Don’t you think you should be part of that process? Don’t you think your opinion matters?

And, no, you can’t really defend not voting by suggesting that “they’re all the same” and it doesn’t make a difference. Both on the county-wide level and in many school board races, there are stark differences and your vote could well be the deciding one in which path our county and our school take in the coming years. Not to mention that the State Supreme Court balance will be decided by this election, the court is currently split 3-3 and the winner will tip the scales toward one party or another.

Even without local media coverage, the Internet offers a lot of options to find out about each of us running for office. Most of the candidates for office have sites and you can hear directly from them, without a filter, what they stand for and why they should be elected. Except for my opponent, Frank McIlwaine, who chose not to have a Web site. And that choice, in and of itself, speaks volumes about the startling differences between us.

In just a few minutes, in front of the computer you’re reading this on, you can fully educate yourself on the issues and make intelligent, informed decisions on Election Day. And keep this in mind: your vote will have roughly 1000 times the impact this year that your vote had in the national election last year. A tiny handful of votes could well make the difference.

Be part of the solution. Vote.

* * *

You probably didn’t hear about the League of Women Voters forum for the County Row offices on Oct 18 in the County Library in Exton. There wasn’t a ton of publicity for the event and the local daily newspaper, the increasingly ironically named Daily Local News chose not to cover it.

As an old newspaperman I’m more saddened by this than angry. Local politics used to be the heart of local coverage, until focus groups claimed people didn’t want to read about politics in the paper. So the powers that be, mostly former ad salesmen turned publishers, worked methodically to cut the amount of political coverage in your local paper. Which, by the way, is about the same time the political landscape began to turn toxic — although 24/7 cable TV news played a part in that as well.

Interestingly, readership has dropped like a rock. The funny thing about focus groups is this: people lie. A lot. Smart newspaper editors know what people read by what they get phone calls, letters and now, e-mails and story comments online, about. Even in the DLN, when they did cover the Downingtown Mayoral Debate earlier this month, the comments on the Web version of the story were just about the highest number in recent memory — this just from one town of about 4,000 registered voters.

At its heart, news is conflict. Man versus nature. Man versus car/bus/animal. Man versus man, which is split between crime stories and politics. And politics is full of conflict and human drama — you have winners and losers and many great opportunities for story telling. You temper that mix with a lot of local sports and human interest stories and you have a good product and a steady source of readers and advertisers. And you have to tailor that mix to your local readership — every local paper reflects its region and flavor.

But greed and a lack of vision have derailed thousands of papers like the DLN and they are quite literally dying, and were before the Internet came along. That’s sad both because its bad for our democracy and because I’ll always have a special passion for newspapering.

Something will emerge, a combination of local broadcasting and the Web, to replace this current hole in local news coverage, and we will be better for it. But it is scary to think in this time of unlimited information, that we might have the least well-informed populace in generations.

I’m told another news option will be coming soon, so I hope that competition forces the allegedly local papers to get on the ball and start covering the news again.