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By the people, for the people and of the people

(cont'd) Small-town community papers serve a need unlike that filled by other forms of media. Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Bernard Stein (2002), editor and co-publisher of the Riverdale Press in Bronx, N.Y., echoes what many media pundits today would claim: that the community press must be involved in its community. Speaking to a crowd of authors and journalists at the 2002 National Writers Conference in Wilmington, Del., Stein espoused a view placing responsibility on community papers to be different than their daily counterparts:

"Community newspapers are not the minor leagues of journalism. … They are engaged in an enterprise as important as, though different from, the journalism that dominates the nation's newsstands, air waves and cyberspace. What distinguishes community papers from their competition is that The New York Times or the Washington Post, radio, TV, and the news magazines focus their attention on the famous, the notorious and the powerful, while community newspapers chronicle the lives and concerns of ordinary people" (p. 18).

But small papers must do more than just chronicle the lives of ordinary people, as Stein puts it. They can’t be objective in the traditional sense, because it is their mission not only to chronicle lives but to endorse them. They not only report the news, but they translate the news. Good community papers must determine what issues are important to local residents, and they must give readers a reason to care. “If the area community newspapers aren’t providing vital watchdog services, it’s very likely no one will,” wrote Jock Lauterer in his 1995 book Community Journalism, in which he advocates a more personal approach to the calling (p. 35).

These newspapers also must be open to the public. They must hold conversations with the public, and they must be open to community input. They must be transparent.

And more than merely being open to community voices, they must provide opportunities for community involvement. Their opinion pages should be a cradle for public discourse. Their news content should include, but not completely comprise, content submitted (but not necessarily written) by members of the community. Papers should be open to story ideas, photos, letters and content given by the “citizen journalists” in the community.

Objectivity

Community papers take sides. In Jasper, Texas, after the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd Jr., a young black man, the local paper there felt it incumbent upon them to help residents deal with the crisis (Glascock, 2004). Willis Webb, editor and publisher of the NewsBoy, a weekly Jasper paper with a circulation of roughly 6,000, said his role was to report the news and to help the town cope with the crisis, and he did it mainly through editorial writing and reproduction of community concerns. Glascock (2004) argues that the effort was successful: “The combination of crisis communication discourse and the practice of community, or civic, journalism allowed the NewsBoy to implement an effective campaign in its opinion pages to help restore the town's image.” The newspaper set out to defend and bolster that image through editorials lauding the people of Jasper and decrying the incident as one of extreme irregularity (Glascock, 2004). And though it eventually would come around to defending the national media, who themselves began to depict Jasper more credibly, the NewsBoy at first attacked the press. The national media was not in town to make friends and defend the community, Glascock attested. He quotes District Attorney Guy James Gray, who prosecuted the cases against the three defendants in the killing:

"They (the media) came to tear us down. They came to picture us as Southern rednecks, hillbillies; to picture us the way things happened in Alabama, Georgia and all through the South 50, 75 years ago. The tone of their voice, the nature of their questions, their whole attitude told us in a heartbeat that they weren't our friends. They had come to attack us."

Throughout the ordeal, the NewsBoy was the disseminator of news and ideas regarding the case to those in Jasper, and it was the voice of the community to the outside world. As the primary local media in the area, according to Glascock (2004), the NewsBoy's leadership was a critical and integral resource, allowing the community to present a united front to the outside media during the crisis. —>