H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman Series

Relentlessly Local

Jock Lauterer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807867754
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

No matter how ambitious they may be, most novice journalists don't get their start at the New York Times. They get their first jobs at smaller local community newspapers that require a different style of reporting than the detached, impersonal approach expected of major international publications. As the primary textbook and sourcebook for the teaching and practice of local journalism and newspaper publishing in the United States, Community Journalism addresses the issues a small-town newspaper writer or publisher is likely to face. Jock Lauterer covers topics ranging from why community journalism is important and distinctive; to hints for reporting and writing with a "community spin"; to design, production, photojournalism, and staff management. This third edition introduces new chapters on adjusting to changing demographics in the community and "best practices" for community papers. Updated with fresh examples throughout and considering the newest technologies in editing and photography, this edition of Community Journalism provides the very latest of what every person working at a small newspaper needs to know.

One: The State of Community Journalism

What Is Community Journalism?

Invariably, when people ask, “What is community journalism?” I always feel as if I should be able to respond quickly, “Community journalism is … A, B and C.”

But, being “American by birth, and Southern by the Grace of God,” I can best answer the question “What is community journalism?” with a story—for storytelling is one of the South’s greatest legacies.

And the story itself, told in the first person, came from Governor Mike Easley himself, in his inaugural address to the North Carolina Press Association, the very month he took office, January 2001.

Shortly after Easley was elected governor, he needed some downtime to recover from the rigors of the successful campaign of 2000.

So he took the ferry boat from Southport in his native Brunswick County to his vacation spot at Bald Head Island.

On the way across the sound from Southport to Bald Head Island, Easley spotted the boat’s captain sitting on a copy of the local community newspaper, the State Port Pilot, a prize-winning weekly out of Southport.

Repeat, a weekly—and, at this point, a three-day-old weekly.

But the news would be new to Easley; so the governor-elect asked the captain if he could borrow the paper to read during the boat trip—and the captain said, “Yes.”

Easley read the paper, heartened by, as he put it, “seeing all those faces and names I knew …” So, by the time the boat had gotten to the dock, the governor-elect wasn’t finished with the State Port Pilot.

Easley asked the captain, “Can I keep the paper?”—clearly expecting the old salt to defer …

But this is the response he got: “No,” said the captain flatly, “I haven’t finished with it yet.”

Definition: Small Is Beautiful

A community newspaper is a publication with a circulation under 50,000, serving people who live together in a distinct geographical space with a clear local-first emphasis on news, features, sports, and advertising.

A more liberal definition of community journalism will include papers serving not just “communities of place” but also communities of ethnicity, faith, ideas or interests.

The use of a centralized printing operation, called “clustering,” is one way that community papers contain costs. Here, at the Franklin (N.C.) Press, owned by Community Newspapers Inc. of Athens, Ga., multiple papers are printed each week. Staffs, seen here from several papers, also gather for occasional group workshops.

You know community journalism when you see it. The heartbeat of American journalism. Journalism in its natural state.

Here’s the way one kid put it: After taking my community journalism class, George Butcher concluded, “If people are the most important thing on the planet, then community is what life is all about. Following that logic, community newspapers are among the most important publications on the planet.”

Faces and Names; Names and Faces

Picking up two random copies of my old weekly, THIS WEEK (now a healthy 10,000-circulation daily in western North Carolina), I was greeted by a couple of stories on inside pages that say everything about what community journalism is …

The first story was about an annual spring academic awards banquet held at one of three high schools in the paper’s coverage area. After a synopsis of the principal’s congratulatory speech, the writer listed the names of all 80 high school students—and their parents’ names as well! The 33-inch story was accompanied by a large photograph of the group. Large enough—four columns wide—so you could clearly make out the face of each kid.

On another page I found a 30-inch news release from the local arts council detailing the opening of Alice through the Looking Glass, an original production involving 80 area kids. Again, every single character and every single young actor was listed—and yes, this story, too, was accompanied by a four-column-wide photo.

In the words of 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning weekly newspaper editor and co-publisher Bernard L. Stein of the Riverdale Press of New York City, “Our job is to cover the everyday lives of ordinary people.”

Relentlessly Local

Beyond the beltway—far from the stakeouts for the latest news celebrity, shouted interviews-by-ambush, “Gotcha quotes” and pack journalism—there exists another kind of newspaper journalism. Small-j journalism, some call it.

It’s the kind of journalism practiced by newspapers where the readers can walk right into the newsroom and tell an editor what’s on their minds. It’s the kind of newspaper that covers the town council, prints the school lunch menus, leads the sports page with the high school football game, tells you who visited Aunt Susie last week and runs photos of proud gardeners holding oddly shaped vegetables.

The paper is loaded with weddings, anniversaries, engagements, police blotter reports, sports statistics, births and obituaries—all with one common denominator: The emphasis of the paper is local first, or what late CBS legend Charles Kuralt called “relentlessly local.”

We call such papers “community newspapers.”

Though the label may be new to some, the practice and form have been around since the first wooden hand presses cranked up over 200 years ago in this country. That rich tradition is strong in every state; I like the motto of the Quakertown (Pa.) Free Press: “100 percent local since 1881.” In the words of editor Jim Sachetti of the Bloomsburg (Pa.) Press-Enterprise: “Local?—It’s the only game in town.”

Though such papers are small, their impact is large.

Daily Proof That Their Town Was Still There

When the great flood of April 1997 ravaged the town of Grand Forks, N.D., the Grand Forks Herald kept on publishing, in spite of the fact that the entire down-town was under water and the newspaper office was devastated. The 35,000-circulation Knight Ridder daily kept on keeping on. Publisher Mike Maidenberg recalls they decided, “We’re going to publish something, no matter how primitive.” For two months, a nearby elementary school on higher ground provided a computer lab with old Macs and “little chairs for our middle-aged butts,” quips Maidenberg. The staff, many of whom had suffered the same fate as many of the readers, camped out in rented RVS by the school in order to put the paper out. Each day the paper was e-mailed to its sister paper, the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, where two editors put the Herald together. Once printed, the papers were flown 300 miles back to Grand Forks in time for 11 A.M. free distribution. “People couldn’t believe it,” Maidenberg says. “The city had burned, the town was flooded, the paper office destroyed, and yet—here was the newspaper!” Editor Mike Jacobs said afterward that the newspaper in a weird way became the virtual community, providing the daily proof that their town was still there. The Herald staff won a Pulitzer for public service in 1998 for their dedication to their craft and service to their community. Even after the recovery, Maidenberg says readers with complaints didn’t forget. A typical barb might be softened like this: “ ‘I’m so mad at you about [you name it], but, I’ll never forget what you did for us in the flood.’” And when longtime publisher Maidenberg retired, the mayor proclaimed Saturday, Dec. 13, 2003, “Mike Maidenberg Day.”

You Are Here

Upon entering any shopping mall, the newcomer is sure to be greeted just inside the mall’s entrance by a large map or schematic model showing the location of the various shops and food courts. Then the shopper orients him- or herself by finding the big red dot bearing the inscription “You Are Here.”

It would strike me as being eminently worthwhile if we in community journalism could but pinpoint our location so precisely in the American journalistic landscape.

And I use the inclusive “we” here with good reason. For 15 years I was co-founding editor-publisher of a pair of community newspapers in North Carolina. Though I am a journalism teacher now, I like to think of myself as a Once and Future Publisher—for I intend to have a piece of another community paper before I’m through. So it is not with a detached, ivory tower point of view that I began asking: What is the state of community journalism? For I too am a stakeholder.

Two States of Community Journalism

The very topic itself, “The State of Community Journalism,” could be taken semantically at least two ways. That title implies a question: What is the current situation regarding community journalism in the United States? As in the State of the Union address, or Ed Koch’s famous line: “How’m I doin’?” We’ll look at the big picture first, and then zoom in for the break-out numbers. Relax, you mathphobics, the arithmetic will be simple.

The National Picture: Daily Dilemmas, Weekly Strength

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

—CHARLES DICKENS, A Tale of Two Cities

Dickens could have been writing about the newspaper industry during America’s post-9/11 era, midway between the millennium and the ‘teens, when big dailies see their readership continue to slide, small dailies struggle to find their identities, and weeklies quietly flourish.

Make no mistake about it: The people who are running the growing weeklies (any paper that comes out less than four times a week) are not smoking fat cigars, sitting back in their chairs with their feet on the desk. They are, as the expression goes, busting their humps.

That being said, the numbers are in: As this book goes to press, looking at figures from the mid-’90s till now, there are more weeklies, reaching more people, with a higher average circulation.

Who’d a-thunk it? Weeklies, long deemed the redheaded stepchild of the media industry, making a go of it, doing an end run on the stumbling big guys.

By The Numbers

Community newspapers (defined as weeklies and small dailies) dominate the U.S. newspaper landscape. There are 9,321 total newspapers, 9,104 of which are small newspapers. Here’s the breakdown, according to the 2004 Editor & Publisher Year Book:

Dailies. 85 percent (or 1,239 of the nation’s 1,456 daily newspapers) have circulations of under 50,000 and are thus classified as “Small Newspapers” by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE). Because of their local news emphasis, I call them community newspapers too. These small dailies reach 44 percent of all daily readers.

Furthermore, of the 1,239 small dailies, 85 percent (1,047) have circulations of under 25,000. On the other hand, overall, only 15 percent (217 dailies) fall into the classification of “big” dailies, papers with circulations in excess of 50,000. Again, the “big/small” line in the sand comes from ASNE, not me.

Weeklies. In addition, there are 7,865 weeklies (including twice-weeklies and tri-weeklies, but excluding shoppers) with an average circulation of 7,467 readers, reaching 50.2 million readers, for a near all-time high in readership, according to the Newspaper Association of America figures.

Urban alternative weeklies such as the Portland (Ore.) Mercury, with its political/arts and entertainment niche marketing, have enjoyed strong growth recently. Notice the paper’s spunky focus: “News • Culture • Trouble.”

Now fold in other types of often-overlooked community newspapers, including (again, from the 2004 E&P Year Book) along with circulation numbers for the largest circulation categories:

• 112 alternative community papers, reaching 7.5 million readers

• 188 black community papers, reaching 5.4 million readers

• 135 ethnic community papers

• 39 gay and lesbian community papers

• 137 Hispanic community papers, reaching 6.2 million readers

• 103 Jewish community papers

• 116 military community papers

• 114 parenting community papers, reaching 5.2 million readers

• 125 religious community papers

• 92 senior community papers

Totals. Add it all up and you’ll find that 97 percent of the nation’s newspapers are “small” or community papers, while only 3 percent are “big.”

The 9,104 “small” newspapers reach 108.9 million readers.

The 217 “big” major metro dailies reach 38.2 million readers.

Kind of makes you think differently about the word “small.”

Now, most likely there is overlap in readership. (At our house we subscribe to three papers: one major metro, one large community daily and a weekly.) We are probably not alone; clearly more research is needed in dual readership statistics and patterns.

A Snapshot Of One State

But the title “The State of Community Journalism” could also be interpreted as a declaration, as in: Wyoming, the State of Community Journalism! For friends, as Bob Dylan said, “you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.”

In the Tar Heel State where I teach, North Carolina’s statistics on community journalism mirror the national figures: 182 out of the 189 newspapers, or 96 percent, are community newspapers by my definition.

The breakdown goes like this:

• 141 weeklies, semi- and tri-weeklies (75 percent of the state’s papers are weeklies)

• 48 dailies, including:

• 3 major metros with circulations of 100,000 or more

• 5 big regional dailies, with circulations of 50,000–99,999, which still pay a considerable amount of attention to local news, even if “local” is 10 to 30 counties!

• 40 community dailies, with circulations of under 50,000 (85 percent of the state’s dailies are “small”)

Online Stats

Of the 189 newspapers in the state, 135 have Web sites, of which 127, or 94 percent, belong to “small” newspapers.

Ownership

Of the state’s dailies, 88 percent are chain or group owned.

Of the state’s 141 weeklies, 73 (52 percent) are still family or independently owned. That’s a fairly remarkable figure these days: the majority of the state’s weeklies are still in local hands.

Got Local?

According to a reader survey done by Belden Associates for the North Carolina Press Association, 81 percent of those polled said they read a newspaper in the last week. The 2000 N.C. Statewide Readership Study also underscores what other similar surveys have revealed:

• People want local news. 61 percent listed Local Community News as the “most important” part of the paper.

• Local news is the most read part o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Community Journalism: Relentlessly Local
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: The State of Community Journalism
• 2: With Apologies to Nike, but Why Just Do It?
• 3: What Am I Doing Here?
• 4: Whose Paper Is It Anyway?
• 5: About That Little Old Lady from Dubuque
• 6: About the Community in Community Journalism
• 7: News
• 8: Features
• 9: Editorials
• 10: Interviewing and Writing
• 11: It Used to Be Called the Women’s Page
• 12: Community Sports
• 13: Graphics, Design and the Community Paper
• 14: Photojournalism
• 15: Technology and Community Newspapers
• 16: Ethics and Community Newspapers
• 17: We Mean Business, Too
• 18: Newsroom Management
• 19: ¿Hablamos Español? (Do We Speak Spanish?)
• 20: The Great Good Paper
• 21: The Evolution of a Community Newspaper
• 22: A Johnny Appleseed Community Journalism Roadshow
• 23: Two Case Studies of Community Newspaper Start-Ups
• 24: Speedbumps and Troubleshooting
• Epilogue
• A Community Journalism Glossary
• More Resources and References for Community Journalists
• Index