Every once in a while, people will fall prey to the delusion that, because I write for a living, I may also be able to speak.

And they invite me to join them for lunch, breakfast, or supper so that I can talk to them.

Hey! A free meal is always welcome.

While I consider it a privilege to be asked, getting up in front of a group of people and flapping my gums is not my favourite thing. And I'm sure it's not theirs, either, by the time I'm done, which is why I usually try to get my free meal before fumbling through my speech.

Recently, I was privileged to be asked to share breakfast with a local Rotary Club, the Sunrise group in Walnut Grove, in exchange for some insights on the relevancy and the future of community journalism.

I spoke before breakfast, and to my delighted surprise, they did let me eat after I had done.

The one thing I do enjoy about making a speech is the research that goes into writing it, and the information that it uncovers - there's always something of interest to be found when you start digging into any topic.

This is one of the insights that I hope proved interesting to my listeners:

"Before I take you into the future of community newspapers, I want to set the stage by taking you back... certainly back before the Langley Advance came into existence nearly 80 years ago. We have to go back before linotype machines and printing presses churned out community announcements, local news reports, and advertisements for the local business district.

"We're going back before Gutenburg built the famous printing press which eventually changed modern communication as completely as today's digital doohickeys are doing. Few people could read anything at all in the 1400s. Much of the information was still passed along at that time by over-the-back-fence gossip and the hail-fellow-well-met chatter from strangers passing through town... the bloggers and Twitterers of their day.

"To find the roots of community journalism, we have to go so far back, in fact, that we really have to guess at what might have been the first 'news' stories.

"Some archaeologists have come to the conclusion that the drawings on the walls of the Lascoux caves in France are actually hunting stories in picture form, passed along to inform fellow hunters where and how to stalk and kill the best meat-providing animals.

"The artists were capturing the events of their day and writing them on the cave walls... just as Egyptian priests chronicled the feats and accomplishments of each Pharaoh's generation and wrote them on the walls of his (or her) crypt... just as monks and scribes of the Middle Ages reverently penned, with baroquely perfect letters on vellum, their current affairs - which became our history.

"It's not really any different from when I, as a reporter, went out with notepad and pen to capture a Langley council meeting or a ball game. Instead of vellum, I had an typewriter. Instead of paint on a cave wall, I carried around a Nikon camera.

"The stories are all really the same - on a cave or pyramid wall or on a dusty scroll or in a dusty newspaper archive - or on the viewscreen of your iPad or maybe projected on the inside of your skull from an implanted micro-chip.

"They are the stories of our existence as a community - whether the community is Langley, or an abbey in northern Germany, or the capital city of ancient Egypt, or a tribe of hunter/gatherers from 25,000 years ago.

"Community journalism is the community communicating with itself - whether the communication is through a newspaper or a website or a mobile phone app or somebody's blog or a Facebook page or... whatever may be coming down the pike next.

"Community journalism identifies us. It's important to know who we are. And that's what community journalism tells us."

Visit Bob Groeneveld's blog, Editor's Notes, at http://tiny.cc/v7b94