Monthly Archives: November 2008

Tom Gish, a rural newspaper editor who made a difference

Posted on November 25, 2008 by Howard Owens

I think this obit of Tom Gish came to me via Romenesko earlier today. I just now had time to read it. It’s all worth reading, but here’s the relevant hyperlocal/citizen journalism part:

The Gishes were city journalists when they published their first edition in January of 1957, and they decided to bring a city style to the Eagle. The newspaper they had purchased was filled with community columnists, mostly women, who wrote the news of their small towns — who was visiting, the successes of children, the illnesses of elders.

Tom and Pat concluded the Eagle’s columnists violated every rule taught in their university journalism classes. The columns (from places like Ice, Blackey and Millstone) weren’t written in “news style.” They weren’t “objective.” And often they weren’t even about what city journalists would define as news, unless you considered the bounty of somebody’s garden to be worthy of newsprint.

So the Gishes stripped the columnists from the Eagle…and the Eagle’s circulation dropped like a very heavy rock. Nobody wanted a weekly newspaper that didn’t have “the news.”

Tom and Pat quickly relented and resumed printing the columns from the little coal camps dotted up the creeks that ran between the mountains. They realized that the definition of “news” used by their sophisticated professors at the university was just plain wrong. What the columnists wrote about — the day-to-day life of a community — WAS news. It was the most important news the Eagle could ever publish.

Tom and Pat spent the next 50 years practicing the most democratic form of journalism the country has ever seen. Everybody and anybody could be a reporter for the Eagle. The paper wasn’t written FOR a community. The Eagle was written BY a community. In the ‘90s, Tom began collecting phone messages people would call into a special line at the Eagle. The messages were often silly, crude at times and they appeared in the paper unfiltered. Unless the messages were libelous, they went onto the page headlined “Speak Your Piece.”

Like the columns, Tom’s Speak Your Piece feature was filled with the life of the county and often with news by anyone’s definition. In the 1990s, state police used information that appeared there to aid a criminal investigation of county officials. Speak Your Piece helped indict a handful of local officials.

A while back I read a book titled Managing Newspaper Correspondents. In the defination of the book, a correspondent was a house wife or farmer or society lady who sent in a weekly column of “locals” to his or her newspaper. This 1941 book said there were 250,000 newspaper correspondents in America at the time. I often wonder, what happened to them all? Continue reading →

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Horace Greeley on ‘hyperlocal’ journalism

Posted on November 16, 2008 by Howard Owens

Horace Greeley to “Friend Fletcher” in April, 1830:

Begin with a clear conception that the subject of deepest interest to an average human being is himself; next to that he is most concerned about his neighbors. Asia and the Tongo Islands stand a long way after these in his regard…. Do not let a new church be organized, or new members be added to one alrea! dy existing, a farm be sold, a new house raised, a mill set in motion, a store opened, nor anything of interest to a dozen families occur, without having the fact duly, though briefly, chronicled in your columns. If a farmer cuts a big tree, or grows a mammoth beet, or harvests a bounteous yield of wheat or corn, set forth the fact as concisely and unexceptionally as possible.

Is there a better description of what we now call hyperlocal journalism? Continue reading →

Tagged Journalism | 3 Comments

Walter Lippmann on a ‘Free Press’

Posted on November 16, 2008 by Howard Owens

The quote is from Walter Lippmann’s book Public Opinion. Keep in mind, he wrote this in 1922, not 2002.

This insistent and ancient belief that truth is not earned, but inspired, revealed, supplied gratis, comes out very plainly in our economic prejudices as readers of newspapers. We expect the newspaper to serve us with truth however unprofitable the truth may be. For this difficult and often dangerous service, which we recognize as fundamental, we expected to pay until recently the smallest coin turned out by the mint. We have accustomed ourselves now to paying two and even three cents on weekdays, and on Sundays, for an illustrated encyclopedia and vaudeville entertainment attached, we have screwed ourselves up to paying a nickel or even a dime. Nobody thinks for a moment that he ought to pay for his newspaper. He expects the fountains of truth to bubble, but he enters into no contract, legal or moral, involving any risk, cost or trouble to himself. He will pay a nominal price when it suits him, will stop paying whenever it suits him, will turn to another paper when that suits him.

Somebody has said quite aptly that the newspaper editor has to be re-elected every day.

This casual and one-sided relationship between readers and press is an anomaly of our civilization. There is nothing else quite like it, and it is, therefore, hard to compare the press with any other business or institution. It is not a business pure and simple, partly because the product is regularly sold below cost, but chiefly because the community applies one ethical measure to the press and another to trade or manufacture.

Ethically a newspaper is judged as if it were a church or a school. But if you try to compare it with these you fail; the taxpayer pays for the public school, the private school is endowed or supported by tuition fees, there are subsidies and collections for the church. You cannot compare journalism with law, medicine or engineering, for in every one of these professions the consumer pays for the service.

A free press, if you judge by the attitude of the readers, means newspapers that are virtually given away. Yet the critics of the press are merely voicing the moral standards of the community, when they expect such an institution to live on the same plane as that on which the school, the church, and the disinterested professions are supposed to live.

This illustrates again the concave character of democracy. No need for artificially acquired information is felt to exist. The information must come naturally, that is to say gratis, if not out of the heart of the citizen, then gratis out of the newspaper. The citizen will pay for his telephone, his railroad rides, his motor car, his entertainment. But he does not pay openly for his news.

Continue reading →