When newspapers were NEWSpapers
By BILL DUNCAN Sally Kruse is a farm wife who became a journalist when she wrote her own wedding story and submitted it to the local newspaper. The editor hired her as a society writer. That was when newspapers had a society section and a dogfight on main street was more important to readers than all the bad news from around the globe. Since then three generations of the Kruses have worked in the editorial department of the Roseburg, Ore. daily News-Review. Sally’s daughter, Karen, worked there and now her grandson, Evan, is a computer techie doing the online edition. Since Sally’s day, the newspaper has been through several revolutions in typesetting, printing and certainly in its content. Sally is from my era of journalism. She has a theory about why newspapers all over America are folding. This trend could be turned around, she told Evan, if they brought back the country correspondents. I agree, although her grandson was appalled at the idea. I may have thought that myself when I was one of those sophisticated reporters working for the mets in Los Angeles. It doesn’t take a mental giant to see what is happening to those mets, not only in Los Angeles, but all across the United States. I left the big city to take an editorship of the Daily Democrat, a small daily newspaper in Woodland, Calif. It was on there that I discovered the charm of a small town newspaper and its far-flung country correspondents. Those journalists were not spoiled by all the book learning from colleges and universities. They were untrained housewives picking up extra money by writing tidbits about their neighbors. At first, coming from the big city newspapers, I was astounded at a story that had been printed in the Democrat about a farmer from Guinda that had bought a new Chevrolet and was seen driving it on Main Street in Woodland. When I took an afternoon break at the local coffee shop, everyone in the café was talking about Old Tom’s new Chevrolet. It was news. Good news. I decided as a sophisticated editor, I had better pay more attention to the news from the local farm wives. What I found was a literary treasure. Admittedly some had to be edited for a family newspaper, like the one that came in about a wedding that was consummated at the altar. Or the wedding announcement that said the groom’s fraternity brothers had all been familiar with the bride. One that I recall had a couple leaving their home in Capay for their annual affair in Davis. The one keeper was the story about a farmer’s wife who was feeling much better after slipping on a cow pie in the barn and breaking her arm. In 1982 I captured on video a newscast by Dan Rather about a weekly newspaper, the Saguache Crescent in Saguache, Colo. that was still printing in hot metal on an old flatbed press. Its editor and publisher was Marie Combs, who was then 75 years old and continued gathering the local news and setting stories about potlucks, bake sales and local events on a Lin-0-Type. The CBS news commentator, Bob McNamara described its contents as like a letter from home. I have a priceless book in my library written in 1955 by Charlotte Paul called “Minding Our Own Business,” about a weekly newspaper she and her husband, Ed Groshell bought sight unseen — the Snoqualmie Valley Record, a weekly community newspaper in Washington. It is a delightful story about the challenges of producing a community newspaper. This is a quote that should be the mantra of every newspaper that is struggling in today’s newspaper industry: “Our job was to build, not destroy, even if it meant telling less than the full truth about some of our citizens. The publishers of large metropolitan dailies, like the czars of big business, keep a comfortable distance between themselves and their customers, but small newspapers cannot afford such aloofness.” I have no doubt that small newspapers, just like the Saguache Crescent, will continue to exist in this era of change. I agree with Sally, I’d rather read about a dogfight on Main Street than some far off unrelated event just because it came in on the AP wire. (Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)
The View From Here