Last September, upon receiving a job offer here at the Newton Daily News, the first thing I did was type “Newton, IA” into my Google search bar.

Maybe I’m a true product of my generation, but I Google everything. It only made sense to utilize the website to learn as much as I could about this town along I-80 that I always passed on my drive to Ames, but had never actually visited.

After scrolling past Newton’s official web site and various Wikipedia pages, two listings in particular caught my eye — a pair of articles from the New York Times, one from 2006 and one from 2007.