While I haven’t stopped bragging since I got back from South Dakota last week (see story on page 3), winning an award wasn’t the highlight of attending the conference.
The annual International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors (ISWNE) conference is always an educational experience. Some of what we discuss is the somewhat unexciting day-to-day challenges of gathering and publishing news. But even in the unglamorous world of small-town newspapering, there are utterly inspiring stories.
Richard Gurner told of founding and operating a new biweekly community newspaper in Caerphilly, Wales. His difficulties and triumphs resonated with our own at Respect, though it is fair to say his project is far more ambitious. Like us, he has found there is a desire for more community news, not less.
Linda Belcourt bought the Springwater News in Ontario, another biweekly, venturing into the publishing business in her fifties. As other outlets have closed up around her, she has been able to expand her paper’s reach and readership.
There are stereotypes in this business: the gruff, hard-bitten small-town editor or the diligent reporter who won’t let local officials off the hook. The “tough but fair” attitude is ever-present at the conference, even among nicest people you could hope to meet.
Our Golden Quill contest judge, Dana Hess, is a veteran journalist and editor with a number of South Dakota news outlets. He currently covers state politics for an online publication.
He can do gruff. Speaking to our whole group, he offered some direct criticism of our writing. But he also questioned whether an editorialist’s focus should be on the bad news, especially in community newspapers.
Hess said that ideally one out of ten opinion pieces should be pointed and critical, and the majority should “point with pride” at the community the paper serves. (And, he added, we should save some room for editorials in a third, trickier category: damning with faint praise.)
The “one in ten” ratio is flexible, of course, but it was instructive to hear from an editor of Hess’s standing that opinion writing doesn’t always have to be negative.
The banquet and awards night offered more highly-inspiring moments. One was seeing Joey Asher of the Highlands Current in Cold Spring, New York accept the Golden Quill award. His winning entry reflected on what he learned about ability and disability from his long relationship with his late brother-in-law; and especially what he feels he learned too late.
A personal lesson to be sure, but one he had the courage to share for all of his readers to learn from.
The other awards-night inspiration came from Eric Meyer, publisher of the Marion County Record in Kansas.
This small-town paper made international news in 2023 when police raided its office and the homes of its staff to prevent publication of a story that would have criticized the police chief.
Meyer related the story of the raid, its horrifying immediate and ongoing consequences, and the subsequent charges and lawsuits brought against various authorities.
He said in the current political climate, especially in the U.S, even small weekly papers have to face accusations of being fake news, or are associated with “mainstream media.”
“We are not the mainstream media,” Meyer said. “We are the Main Street media.”
And for me, that’s the point of what we all do. The great value of community news is its immediate proximity—geographical, historical, and personal—to the people it serves.