I grew up in a tiny town that by the time I was born had begun the slow, sad march towards being a very tiny town. My tiny town was bordered by two slightly larger towns, each served by its own newspaper.
Those newspapers served my tiny town remarkably well. There was a local reporter who everyone knew and who covered every town council meeting, school board meeting, water board meeting, parade, festival, and prayer breakfast. He would produce tight, old-school newspaper prose on a daily basis and “face his public” at the local high school’s football and basketball games – which had their own group of dedicated reporters.
He was actually kind of a prick, but a solid reporter nonetheless. And he made the paper matter to my town.
As a good high school student, one of my objectives was to get my picture in these local papers as often as possible. National Honor Society. Essay contest. Best pig at the 4-H Fair (note: not true). If I was honored in any manner, the local papers covered it. In retrospect, it was not a busy town.
But those newspapers were the key to sharing information in my tiny community and even among my family. One night, I received a call from my uncle congratulating me for something or other. “Thanks. How did you find out?” I asked.
It turns out my photo was in the local paper, which was on the floor of the restroom in a local restaurant, and…well…my uncle had some time to kill.
That story is now nearly twenty years old, and times have not been good to small-town newspapers. Old cities and small towns continue to die, circulation has dropped, and the Internet promises to clean up whatever is left.
This has led to consolidated papers and a demise of local ownership, which has suddenly given these community papers a feel of an import product. If you read a small time paper, odds are good that someone else in some other small town is reading the exact same copy. Homogenization has come to the small town paper.
So, newsroom staffs have shrunk, distant corporate masters with their own agendas are driving the editorial content, and the space to fill remains the same. This has led to a collapse in the quality of writing across the country. Local columnists are now either boring copies of some national archetype, extraordinarily old people reminiscing about better days, or part-time writers with bizarre agendas.
We think that smaller communities deserve better.
So, we are here to let these small time hacks that people are actually reading and noting their drivel. Granted, it may just be two guys ignoring their family obligations via a blog. But we are reading it.
And these writers are not serving their communities with first person stories about their Aunt Edna, stories cribbed from forwarded emails, disconnected rants on national political issues, tales about their amusing dog, or any of the other time wasters that now make up much of the copy for local columnists.
We expect better. And we know readers deserve better because we are those readers. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe serve a valuable purpose. But they don’t tell you when Mayor Quimby has a slush fund. There are great stories in every town in America (with the possible exception of Flagstaff). Find them. Write about them. And then we will find something else to blog about, like the decline of the local bakery.
We promise to muck up these small time muckrakers. And we promise to be completely obnoxious while doing so. And we may even update this place once a month. That’s our promise to you, our loyal readers. (Current readership: 0).
So…let’s see what’s doing out there in the newsroons of Nowheresville, America.
1 Comment
June 23, 2008 at 5:53 pm
What he said.