Geoff McGhee
In the United States, some 7,500 community newspapers – papers with under 30,000 in circulation – still hit the streets, front porches, and mailboxes at least once a week.
Rural journalism is surviving, even thriving, in the rural West and across the United States, in an era of precipitous decline for major metropolitan newspapers.
A 2010 survey conducted by the University of Missouri, Columbia for the National Newspaper Association produced some enviable statistics: More than three-quarters of respondents said they read most or all of a local newspaper every week. And in news to warm the heart of any publisher, a full 94 percent said that they paid for their papers.
“The community newspaper business is healthier than metro newspapers, because it hasn’t been invaded by Internet competition,” says Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky. “Craigslist doesn’t serve these kinds of communities. They have no effective competition for local news. Rural papers own the franchise locally of the most credible information.”
This is not to say that rural papers are simply going gangbusters. Rural newsrooms make for lean living and busy workweeks. Reporters have to wear many hats to put out a local paper, interviewing Eagle Scouts, snapping photos of the butter queen, writing editorials on the local rec center and stuffing supermarket circulars. And many of these papers are an advertiser or two away from red ink.
All of this is in the service of developing a relationship with the local readers that some people say that mainstream journalism has lost, a relationship with all the complications that intimacy and proximity bring.
“You have only one day a week to beat the daily on timeliness,” wrote the editor and publisher Bruce M. Kennedy in his 1974 book, Community Journalism. But “weeklies can add a personal touch,” he added. “There’s license to ‘visit’ more. You have time and space to be a small-town citizen talking with another about your community.”
“It is more than a little ironic that small-town papers have been thriving by practicing what the mainstream media are now preaching,” writes the broadcast journalist and USC professor Judy Muller in her new book, Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns (University of Nebraska Press). “’Hyper-localism,’ ‘Citizen Journalism,’ ‘Advocacy Journalism’ — these are some of the latest buzzwords of the profession. But the concepts, without the fancy names, have been around for ages in small-town newspapers.”
Inspired by the local weekly in the working-class Rocky Mountain town of Norwood, Colo., Muller embarked on a lively, funny and engaging tour of small papers that took her across the country, from Concrete, Wash. to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
“I was surprised to find that they’re doing as well as they were,” says Muller, whose book looks at feisty family-owned papers like the Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ken., whose founders survived a firebombing, the Guadalupe County Communicator, the “sixth smallest weekly in New Mexico,” whose new owner had been a national correspondent for the Rocky Mountain News, and the Dove Creek Press in Colorado, whose editors are so reluctant to deliver bad news that when doctors estimate a car crash victim’s chance of paralysis at 99 percent, it writes “the family reports that Kelsi is looking to the 1 percent chance she still has.”
According to the publisher Bruce M. Kennedy, “the study of weekly journalism is inescapably the study of small towns.” Muller writes movingly about the close bond between small town papers and their populations.
She describes the elation in the depressed Skagit Valley town of Concrete, Wash., when a young outsider came to revive their newspaper, the Herald. “People were – I’m not kidding – crying and hugging him, “says Muller, “and the paper’s not all that good, frankly, but what it represents to those folks who are so isolated up in that canyon is really powerful.”
The importance of the community of a local paper is something that John Wylie, publisher of the Oologah, Okla. Lake Leader argued for in a 2007 speech to a rural journalism conference:
“To our readers, we are not the newspaper, we are THEIR newspaper. Down the block at Rogers Mini Stop, we sell more than a hundred papers every week. If our press run is late we get frantic calls from the Rogers family. They have a store full of irate customers who want THEIR papers NOW…. We all know the traditional reasons — the little stories that never would be considered ‘news’ anyplace else. Our readers really care about those things.”
So what are townsfolk waiting for so urgently?
“I think the holy trinity of the small town paper is obituaries, the police blotter, and high school sports,” says Muller. “That’s what people care about. The police blotter is where you find out who’s doing what to whom. The school superintendent beating his wife, from there it gets blown into a bigger story.
The high school sports thing is so huge, I can’t even explain it to a person who doesn’t live in a small town. And births, not just obits, tend to dominate. If you leave town, and you subscribe online, those are the things, ‘Oh my God, old Pete just died’ — that might seem insignificant to someone outside of a small town, but every single birth and death means something.”
But surely local journalism has to be about more than recording comings and goings, nighttime calls for help, and salutes to BearCat pride? Muller finds ample journalistic inspiration in the pages of small-town papers, what she calls “this wonderful crucible of telling the truth, weighing that against living with the people you’re writing about.”
Rural journalism analyst Al Cross says, “The best of these newspapers hold local governments and institutions accountable, by covering meetings and asking for records. They’re prophylactics, by exposing bad things that are going on.” But he says, at the same time, “a lot of papers are timid editorially, they don’t take stands.
“One is a social reason, they’d rather make friends than enemies – although personally I think they’re in the wrong business. Then you have the business reasons. In these smaller markets, some of these papers are an advertiser away from red ink, so they’re cautious by nature. ‘Don’t get sued, they say. It’s like they never heard of libel insurance, which is pretty cheap.”
To Muller, biting the hand that feeds you is the definition of courageous journalism: “Papers that – faced with the loss of revenue from a big advertiser – who speak the truth anyway, that’s just pure heroism.”
Despite consolidation, weekly newspapers actually have a lower rate of chain ownership than dailies, with 60 percent owned by chains, compared to 80 percent of dailies, according to the National Newspaper Association. Nevertheless, the quality of newspapers does not strictly correspond to ownership.
Still, community papers are looking like a haven in the media storm. Near the end of Emus Loose in Egnar, Muller cites a remark by Benjy Hamm, editorial director of a rural newspaper chain in South Carolina: “He is seeing more and more resumés from eager, young editors and big-city journalists who have either been victims of downsizing or growing weary of wondering if they will be next.”
“As the number of journalism jobs in metro papers declines,” says Cross, “I think rural journalism will be an increasingly popular outlet for people who want to take it on as a career. The monetary rewards are not as great, but there’s a great deal of personal reward that can come with it, and also an opportunity to get in on the ownership side.”
Muller agrees.
“The reason a weekly thrives is because no one else on Earth can cover what they cover, people will not know what’s going on in their town in any other way. They’ve got a monopoly, a little fiefdom, for as long as the advertiser needs the market.”
As for local readers, she adds, “as long as refrigerator magnets exist, there will be things to clip and put on refrigerator, if your son was on the high school football team, it’s going on the fridge.”