Newspapers have their own language. Their top line, that bold declaration across the front page, is not called a masthead in the way most people think. It is called a flag. The word comes from the old printer’s trade: the flag is the newspaper’s nameplate, its identity, its banner. It is the part you see first, the part you remember, the part that never changes even as the headlines below it shift with each day’s news.
For the New Canaan Sentinel, the flag is more than a title. It is a promise that the life of this community will be recorded with care, accuracy, and respect. And each October, the Sentinel’s flag changes its color. It turns pink.
That small act—the transformation of black type into pink ink—speaks volumes. It says that a local newspaper is not simply a chronicler of events but a participant in community life. It declares that breast cancer is not an abstract concern but a lived reality in the homes and families of New Canaan. The flag becomes a flag in the truest sense: a symbol under which people gather, a marker of solidarity and remembrance.
There is something almost liturgical about it. Newspapers are secular things, but the ritual of the pink flag has become, in its own way, a civic rite. Every October, readers open their papers and see the same words—New Canaan Sentinel—dressed in the same unexpected hue. And they know what it means. They know it is for the neighbor who endured chemotherapy, for the friend who rings the bell at the end of treatment, for the sister, mother, daughter, or wife who is no longer here.
The pink flag is not a stunt. It is not branding. It is remembrance and resolve, folded into the daily habit of reading the news. It makes the personal public. It says what the headlines cannot: that even as we report on town budgets, high school sports, zoning debates, and the texture of daily life, we know there is a deeper story, the story of health and illness, of life and loss, of courage in the face of fear.
In this, the Sentinel continues a long tradition. Newspapers have always been more than detached observers. At their best, they reflect the communities they serve, not from a distance but from within. They speak in the first person plural: we. By turning its flag pink, the Sentinel says simply, we are in this together.
In our time of division, that “we” matters. A pink flag is not partisan. It does not divide by ideology. It unites across the lines that so often fracture us. Everyone knows someone who has fought breast cancer. Everyone has a story. And so the pink flag becomes a gathering place, a reminder that the things we share are stronger than the things that separate us.
There is also hope in it. The pink is not only the color of awareness but the color of progress. It is a reminder of the strides made in research, the lives saved by early detection, the treatments that have turned what was once a sentence into a survivable struggle. Each October, as the Sentinel’s front page arrives in homes across town, it quietly carries that hope into kitchens and onto breakfast tables.
In the end, a newspaper is a mirror. It shows us to ourselves. The Sentinel’s choice to raise a pink flag each October is part of that mirror. It shows New Canaan as a town that remembers, that honors, that hopes.
So let the flag fly. Let it remind us that newspapers are not just about what happened yesterday but about what endures. And let us be grateful that in New Canaan, the local newspaper’s flag is not only a name but a banner—black most of the year, pink when it matters most.
Our flag is pink. And it belongs to all of us.
