The rewards of community journalism
The new issue of American Journalism Review has a great piece on the local paper in a small town in Maine:
It’s said that newspapers are dying, circulation is plummeting, ads are fleeing to the Internet and the young couldn’t care less about them. Well, maybe, but not here, not in Bucksport, a quiet mill town in Downeast Maine. The Bucksport Enterprise isn’t just surviving, it’s thriving. Circulation has doubled in five years, from 1,100 to 2,300 (not bad for a town of 4,961), and the slender little paper has made itself not only modestly profitable but also indispensable to this community of mill workers, tradesmen and shopkeepers. It and other small-town papers like it might just be the envy of all those despairing big-city scribes.
“We’re on a roll,” crows Editor, Publisher and floor sweep Don Houghton, a 65-year-old veteran of newspapers in Providence and Louisville who purchased the paper six years ago. Born just up the road in the relative metropolis of Bangor, he moved out of state within a month and grew up in a Boston suburb, a blemish Bucksport’s charitable citizenry has graciously looked past.
Of course, there are some folks who decline to subscribe to the Enterprise – not because they don’t want to read it, but because they’d sooner buy the weekly when it comes out on Thursday than wait for the mail to deliver it a day later. It’s not unheard of for an impatient reader to call the newspaper and ask precisely where the paper is – whether the approaching carrier is on the right or the left side of the street.
The paper doesn’t have any highfalutin motto, but it does claim to be “A Wicked Good Read.” That word “wicked” didn’t sit well with one of the more puritanical locals, who made no secret of his displeasure.
Not long ago the director of the local funeral parlor was miffed not to be invited to advertise in the summer guide. It wasn’t that Houghton wanted to exclude him; it’s just that he couldn’t imagine how the undertaker would profit from an ad between Allen’s Wild Maine Blueberries and the Bittersweet Gift Shop.
Still, you can’t blame the undertaker. The Enterprise is, after all, The Paper of Record, no less than the New York Times. Last year, according to Houghton, a middle schooler proudly shot his first deer, a local rite of passage. But when the boy boasted to his friends, they dismissed the claim. “No, you didn’t,” they told him. The boy persisted, describing how his father had helped drag the deer from the woods. “No, you didn’t,” classmates answered. “It wasn’t in the Enterprise.” A short time later his feat was confirmed in the Enterprise and all was right with the world.
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Great article, thanks for pointing it out. For small and mid-sized papers, local is totally the way to go. Yes, readers can get state, national and international news anywhere these days, but they only find out why their commute was delayed or what made the neighbor’s house explode through local reporting. (I don’t think we run photos of deer kills, but we do run five-generation photos, and the police blotter, aka “crime watch” here, is consistently one of the most popular sections on the paper’s website.)
Comment by Mel — October 26, 2007 @ 13:44