What a great article! "I'm tired" kind of sums up where we are at the present moment. Atlas is shrugging and with it, the age of diabolical narcissism is about to reach it's pitiful end.
I write for just such a paper. We have a reporter at every public meeting, every week. We also cover the annual yard sale at the big local university. Now that I don't live there, I do phone interviews for personality profiles, not breaking news or public meetings, but it's still all about the issues that matter to the real people in the town. When that paper goes away, the local people will be (unless they start attending three or four public meetings per week) less informed about the things that affect their real life, and if they continue to consume media of some kind, their view of what's happening and what matters will be ever more warped.
Find a way- digital and podcast content- to make that newspaper work. We did in radio (barely). We make 💩 but we made it. Community returns- hold on.
Industrial America returns- hold on.
Thanks to interest rates the chains that left all of flyover America fallow all those pennies are sitting there waiting- and pennies roll into nickels, nickels to dimes, dimes into dollars. Hold on TOB, it’s turning.
One way the paper that employs me survives is that it's family-owned, and the family makes a profit on the printing press by doing other print jobs. They're dedicated to keeping a local media presence in the 10 communities they serve. I don't know how old the current managing generation is. I hope the next generation understands the importance of their family's work.
This network of papers is in eastern PA. I'll bet, though, that the story is the same all over: families running some part of the operation at a profit to enable them to keep up a weekly (or daily, G-d bless those folks) paper that is truly local. There are ads in our papers, both online and in print, but they're for local businesses: a garden center, a hospital, some restaurants, etc.
Remember something especially if you go into digital ads; they don’t live there.
Digital ads; your product is local broadcast, go podcast (radio returns globally this way now).
Your clients/sponsors are local.
Digital- the entry price is low, the competition is global and well resourced- but they don’t live there; they don’t know what “by the old courthouse” means, they don’t know what “ up the Crik (creek) from the ___ Yards” means, they can’t know what “by the old Washington School “ means. THAT is your local and “geolocation” advantage.
They’re not “the Trusted name in news” for 50 years- they can’t be, and the same voice tells them about the local doctor or medical center (MEDICAL HINT HINT HINT). This valuable info we gathered over time.
But the regional papers can still do a good job with small town news due to batch ad buying across the region. I read a newspaper called "exploreclarion.com." Seems like there's still a decent amount of local news. Come to think of it, I guess it's a little heavy on sports and police blotter stuff. Crap, is this the first step away from the truly homegrown newpapers and reporting? It's the only one that's available online without a subscription.
In the UK all the small town papers are now owned by the mega media...but the digital age has seen the rise of the digital small town reporter. We have two where I live, Harrogate Informer and the Stray Ferret (the Stray is a large open green space in the centre of town protected by an act of Parliament and our town is noted for this feature, it's unique). Both cover local news as in Very local news that doesn't make the other media.
I too wrote for our local weekly. Post retirement. As a volunteer. I covered the "political scene", if politics can be a "scene" in a town of 500 fractious souls. Highlights of my nine year tenure included the "dog-shit war" between Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Unger. Hostilities continued for almost two years, before the Constable hung police tape between combatants' yards and threatened both with jail if any more shit was thrown - in either direction. Got six or seven great stories out of that one. I covered formal Council meetings, zoning meetings, committee meetings, and meeting-for-the-sake-of-meeting meetings. I endured visiting politicians on their summer barbecue and bullshit tours. And let our readers know who was shoveling what.
The publisher of our weekly rag sold out a couple of years ago. Tired - she said. Probably true. She's in her mid-eighties. The new owners are a subsidiary of one of the "regional press" publishers. You know the ones - they own 45 weeklies, in 45 towns. The owners of that firm had no use for a somewhat cynical old fart who wrote for the sheer pleasure of it. So they dispensed with my services.
I miss the involvement in the community, and even the pressure of looming deadlines. And I suspect the few hundred people who read our paper miss the purely local flavor that I, and the other volunteer contributors brought to it's pages.
The sad irony is that it was the local journalist that built up 1A and the Truth, only to be torn down by simulacrums, far removed, in high castles that tell us we do not have the reach to see the landscape our feet are planted on.
Truth is strong as an oak on the ground, but once uprooted, root by root, from a distance, it's as fragile as last years dead leaves on dirty dry ground.
The arborist left for a place long ago that delivers apples and took the oaks watering can with him. The water turned fetid along the way, perfectly suitable for arrival at the forest of lies behind the castle walls.
**Forest Behind The Wall FOIA's redacted to make sure you're protected by their long view.
It’s the sort of place where you can still have disagreements among friends, said Andy Holloway, the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service agriculture and natural resources agent for Hemphill County.
“That’s the way it used to be in America,” he said. “That’s the way it is in Canadian.”
That's the way it used to be in the whole Western World friend. America's decline is the West's decline.
Thanks Chris for this article. I grew up in a small town, pop 3400. Each week the local paper would post a play by play account of the Friday night football game. Good memories.
Well, here is your chance to uproot your family and move to TX. Editor Bray. Has a ring to it. Canadian is a beautiful little town on the Canadian River. I had a sister who lived there for a couple of years. They loved it. Sounds like they need someone like you. 😁
“peaceful, restful, where a man can slow down to a walk and live his life full measure."-"A Stop at Willoughby" Season 1, episode 30 of The Twilight Zone.
Vaya con Dios, Canadian Record. The good news is that more of us are opting out of the homogenized pablum of regime media, instead choosing individuality and excellence, like Chris’ Substack, or Don Surber or Emerald Robinson et al.
Everything is cyclical. I suspect that as things evolve, curation and production of local content will emerge in places where people still have a sense of community.
It's the loss of community: community businesses, community newspapers, community focus and cohesion. But it's also the loss of individuality. In a healthy society, what goes on right around you should have the most impact on your life, but I don't even subscribe to the local paper, mostly because it's just a local organ of a larger national beast (Knight-Ridder News or some such or other), and often times when you read it, it's like you're reading someone telling a story about where you live, someone who doesn't actually live here. COVID proved that. We had constant hysteria about how one hospital was so overwhelmed, when had the paper been honest, it would have remarked that that hospital is *always* overwhelmed, even in the best of times.
But now it's the national that feels like it affect us all and the local matters very little though it is similarly out of our control and nonresponsive to people's needs.
We made it in small town radio (side family gig for me) but we made it. We’ll probably merge with other local but he wants us intact to carry on name and work.
> and guess what? Industry returns. As does prosperity slowly. I started carrying Industrial Radio because America is Re industrializing. We started carrying Health care full suite directory,we help people find all the full resources they need (that’s not a small sector, and you make the invaluable ally of the public sector).
Guess more; community returns and the major cities empty of the productive AND work from home means come home.
And people still live here.
No one covers sports locally, no one covers news locally but we do. The sponsors and audience kids play on those teams, not the Yankees. The major chains that gutted local media and don’t cover local news , don’t have sales people out because they let them go to focus on large urban markets?
Well they COULD hire - who?
Trust me more people is my number one problem after payroll. Hard to find. Will get easier. And as the cities implode the interest rates on the major chains that gutted local media rise, which rules out back to the sticks for them. The large chains plan and method was to gut local media and focus on large urban markets because that’s where the money....was.
As far as deplorable pennies; pennies roll into nickels, nickels roll into dimes, dimes roll into dollars. And you get to help your neighbors. After paying bills (and nearly no debt, we own it all) I don’t care about a huge profit. We live here, and we’re trusted. The people who just got a bailout and the other bailouts are trusted by none and reviled by all. Where can they live?
You’re damn right it was hard.
But we made it.
The looters have about run out their string, so don’t despair.
Because some non George Bailey hard hope - key elites have begun to defect to America 🇺🇸, see Musk and many others- they’ve had enough.
The entire SVB thing has an angle suggested to me by Thiel moving and what he moved on (DEI, Green).
The sight of Libertarianism’s groveling route to bailout to save their bad bets makes the $50 billion worth it on SVB fiasco. Not to mention Harry and Megan panic. Worth $25B in inflation, we’ve spent on worse. 🤣
I’m been to Canadian several times. Typical small town in Texas that is slowly dying. It’s still big enough it will finally dwindle to a size it will settle at. Sad but there’s just not much opportunity in places like this. I think it’s still got some oil business. And ranching. Not much farming because not that much irrigation.
Most of us view newspapers like scribbles on the sidewalk; we may read them with interest today but they will be of no interest tomorrow even if they do manage to resist the rain and scuffing.
To genealogical researchers who research the lives of the neither rich nor famous, newspapers are richly-detailed diaries of an entire community. Newspapers are probably the only way to know, for example, that the emerging star pundit Chris Bray probably learned at least some of his skills from his father; a prolific and skilled writer of letters to the editor. :)
What a wonderful article about The Record! Way back in the 70s I worked for our town weekly which is still publishing. I also started (and sold almost 40 yrs ago) a weekly newspaper for seniors which is still going strong - much to my surprise.
Weekly newspapers truly are indispensable for all the reasons mentioned. Hope they find a buyer. There’s something about holding the paper in your hands, though, which can’t be replicated online.
What a great article! "I'm tired" kind of sums up where we are at the present moment. Atlas is shrugging and with it, the age of diabolical narcissism is about to reach it's pitiful end.
I write for just such a paper. We have a reporter at every public meeting, every week. We also cover the annual yard sale at the big local university. Now that I don't live there, I do phone interviews for personality profiles, not breaking news or public meetings, but it's still all about the issues that matter to the real people in the town. When that paper goes away, the local people will be (unless they start attending three or four public meetings per week) less informed about the things that affect their real life, and if they continue to consume media of some kind, their view of what's happening and what matters will be ever more warped.
Find a way- digital and podcast content- to make that newspaper work. We did in radio (barely). We make 💩 but we made it. Community returns- hold on.
Industrial America returns- hold on.
Thanks to interest rates the chains that left all of flyover America fallow all those pennies are sitting there waiting- and pennies roll into nickels, nickels to dimes, dimes into dollars. Hold on TOB, it’s turning.
One way the paper that employs me survives is that it's family-owned, and the family makes a profit on the printing press by doing other print jobs. They're dedicated to keeping a local media presence in the 10 communities they serve. I don't know how old the current managing generation is. I hope the next generation understands the importance of their family's work.
This sounds familiar, literally almost ;)
This network of papers is in eastern PA. I'll bet, though, that the story is the same all over: families running some part of the operation at a profit to enable them to keep up a weekly (or daily, G-d bless those folks) paper that is truly local. There are ads in our papers, both online and in print, but they're for local businesses: a garden center, a hospital, some restaurants, etc.
Remember something especially if you go into digital ads; they don’t live there.
Digital ads; your product is local broadcast, go podcast (radio returns globally this way now).
Your clients/sponsors are local.
Digital- the entry price is low, the competition is global and well resourced- but they don’t live there; they don’t know what “by the old courthouse” means, they don’t know what “ up the Crik (creek) from the ___ Yards” means, they can’t know what “by the old Washington School “ means. THAT is your local and “geolocation” advantage.
They’re not “the Trusted name in news” for 50 years- they can’t be, and the same voice tells them about the local doctor or medical center (MEDICAL HINT HINT HINT). This valuable info we gathered over time.
Make it work.
But the regional papers can still do a good job with small town news due to batch ad buying across the region. I read a newspaper called "exploreclarion.com." Seems like there's still a decent amount of local news. Come to think of it, I guess it's a little heavy on sports and police blotter stuff. Crap, is this the first step away from the truly homegrown newpapers and reporting? It's the only one that's available online without a subscription.
In the UK all the small town papers are now owned by the mega media...but the digital age has seen the rise of the digital small town reporter. We have two where I live, Harrogate Informer and the Stray Ferret (the Stray is a large open green space in the centre of town protected by an act of Parliament and our town is noted for this feature, it's unique). Both cover local news as in Very local news that doesn't make the other media.
I too wrote for our local weekly. Post retirement. As a volunteer. I covered the "political scene", if politics can be a "scene" in a town of 500 fractious souls. Highlights of my nine year tenure included the "dog-shit war" between Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Unger. Hostilities continued for almost two years, before the Constable hung police tape between combatants' yards and threatened both with jail if any more shit was thrown - in either direction. Got six or seven great stories out of that one. I covered formal Council meetings, zoning meetings, committee meetings, and meeting-for-the-sake-of-meeting meetings. I endured visiting politicians on their summer barbecue and bullshit tours. And let our readers know who was shoveling what.
The publisher of our weekly rag sold out a couple of years ago. Tired - she said. Probably true. She's in her mid-eighties. The new owners are a subsidiary of one of the "regional press" publishers. You know the ones - they own 45 weeklies, in 45 towns. The owners of that firm had no use for a somewhat cynical old fart who wrote for the sheer pleasure of it. So they dispensed with my services.
I miss the involvement in the community, and even the pressure of looming deadlines. And I suspect the few hundred people who read our paper miss the purely local flavor that I, and the other volunteer contributors brought to it's pages.
Dog poop is hot local politics.
https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2014/06/17/san-marino-mayor-resigns-after-being-censured-over-dog-poop-incident/
The sad irony is that it was the local journalist that built up 1A and the Truth, only to be torn down by simulacrums, far removed, in high castles that tell us we do not have the reach to see the landscape our feet are planted on.
Truth is strong as an oak on the ground, but once uprooted, root by root, from a distance, it's as fragile as last years dead leaves on dirty dry ground.
The arborist left for a place long ago that delivers apples and took the oaks watering can with him. The water turned fetid along the way, perfectly suitable for arrival at the forest of lies behind the castle walls.
**Forest Behind The Wall FOIA's redacted to make sure you're protected by their long view.
Another indicator of societal collapse.
Danny Huckabee
It’s the sort of place where you can still have disagreements among friends, said Andy Holloway, the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service agriculture and natural resources agent for Hemphill County.
“That’s the way it used to be in America,” he said. “That’s the way it is in Canadian.”
That's the way it used to be in the whole Western World friend. America's decline is the West's decline.
Thanks Chris for this article. I grew up in a small town, pop 3400. Each week the local paper would post a play by play account of the Friday night football game. Good memories.
That's EXACTLY what those newspapers do, and what they should do. It's so sad to lose it.
Well, here is your chance to uproot your family and move to TX. Editor Bray. Has a ring to it. Canadian is a beautiful little town on the Canadian River. I had a sister who lived there for a couple of years. They loved it. Sounds like they need someone like you. 😁
Beats the hell out of CA.
“peaceful, restful, where a man can slow down to a walk and live his life full measure."-"A Stop at Willoughby" Season 1, episode 30 of The Twilight Zone.
Babbittry. I spent too much of my life in Mansfield Ohio and I never knew that word until today. Despite Mansfield being babbittricious.
Vaya con Dios, Canadian Record. The good news is that more of us are opting out of the homogenized pablum of regime media, instead choosing individuality and excellence, like Chris’ Substack, or Don Surber or Emerald Robinson et al.
Gannet is dying for example. https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2022/gannett-reports-disastrous-financial-results-layoffs-are-coming/
Everything is cyclical. I suspect that as things evolve, curation and production of local content will emerge in places where people still have a sense of community.
Gannett's a suicide. At some point they decided to stop running newspapers and chose instead to loot the carcass.
It's the loss of community: community businesses, community newspapers, community focus and cohesion. But it's also the loss of individuality. In a healthy society, what goes on right around you should have the most impact on your life, but I don't even subscribe to the local paper, mostly because it's just a local organ of a larger national beast (Knight-Ridder News or some such or other), and often times when you read it, it's like you're reading someone telling a story about where you live, someone who doesn't actually live here. COVID proved that. We had constant hysteria about how one hospital was so overwhelmed, when had the paper been honest, it would have remarked that that hospital is *always* overwhelmed, even in the best of times.
But now it's the national that feels like it affect us all and the local matters very little though it is similarly out of our control and nonresponsive to people's needs.
But it reverses Madam as I explain-
B@lls. Der dash to be polite.
Small communities return.
😊
We made it in small town radio (side family gig for me) but we made it. We’ll probably merge with other local but he wants us intact to carry on name and work.
> and guess what? Industry returns. As does prosperity slowly. I started carrying Industrial Radio because America is Re industrializing. We started carrying Health care full suite directory,we help people find all the full resources they need (that’s not a small sector, and you make the invaluable ally of the public sector).
Guess more; community returns and the major cities empty of the productive AND work from home means come home.
And people still live here.
No one covers sports locally, no one covers news locally but we do. The sponsors and audience kids play on those teams, not the Yankees. The major chains that gutted local media and don’t cover local news , don’t have sales people out because they let them go to focus on large urban markets?
Well they COULD hire - who?
Trust me more people is my number one problem after payroll. Hard to find. Will get easier. And as the cities implode the interest rates on the major chains that gutted local media rise, which rules out back to the sticks for them. The large chains plan and method was to gut local media and focus on large urban markets because that’s where the money....was.
As far as deplorable pennies; pennies roll into nickels, nickels roll into dimes, dimes roll into dollars. And you get to help your neighbors. After paying bills (and nearly no debt, we own it all) I don’t care about a huge profit. We live here, and we’re trusted. The people who just got a bailout and the other bailouts are trusted by none and reviled by all. Where can they live?
You’re damn right it was hard.
But we made it.
The looters have about run out their string, so don’t despair.
Because some non George Bailey hard hope - key elites have begun to defect to America 🇺🇸, see Musk and many others- they’ve had enough.
The entire SVB thing has an angle suggested to me by Thiel moving and what he moved on (DEI, Green).
The sight of Libertarianism’s groveling route to bailout to save their bad bets makes the $50 billion worth it on SVB fiasco. Not to mention Harry and Megan panic. Worth $25B in inflation, we’ve spent on worse. 🤣
I hope you're right. I like your world much better!
I’m been to Canadian several times. Typical small town in Texas that is slowly dying. It’s still big enough it will finally dwindle to a size it will settle at. Sad but there’s just not much opportunity in places like this. I think it’s still got some oil business. And ranching. Not much farming because not that much irrigation.
My instinct, reading this story, was to get in the car and drive there for a few days. I'm sorry I can't.
I know what you mean. We DO occasionally jump in the truck and head off to small towns where real things are happening to real people. Keeps us sane.
Most of us view newspapers like scribbles on the sidewalk; we may read them with interest today but they will be of no interest tomorrow even if they do manage to resist the rain and scuffing.
To genealogical researchers who research the lives of the neither rich nor famous, newspapers are richly-detailed diaries of an entire community. Newspapers are probably the only way to know, for example, that the emerging star pundit Chris Bray probably learned at least some of his skills from his father; a prolific and skilled writer of letters to the editor. :)
HIGHLY prolific.
why read the local paper for a recipe for scones when chat gpt has every recipe you need?
and it will always tell you how much cricket flour to use
Mmm, cricket flour. My favorite protein for stabilizing the climate!
Made me smile. A sad smile, but a smile nonetheless.
What a wonderful article about The Record! Way back in the 70s I worked for our town weekly which is still publishing. I also started (and sold almost 40 yrs ago) a weekly newspaper for seniors which is still going strong - much to my surprise.
Weekly newspapers truly are indispensable for all the reasons mentioned. Hope they find a buyer. There’s something about holding the paper in your hands, though, which can’t be replicated online.