Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, I worked at the Courier newspaper in Russellville. It was a good experience for me, and gave to me a lot of good experience.
Recently Sean Ingram reached out asking for me to contribute some thoughts about the newspaper for use in a centennial edition marking 100 years of daily publication. I collected some thoughts about the news that had been shaped by teachers and mentors and my own work, and produced a little column.
That column is behind a paywall at the paper, and I understand the need for paywalls. But I wanted to share what I had written; plus it gives me a third blog post in a single day, which is a big change from my typical pattern.
Here’s what I sent to the Courier:
As a young journalist’s first assignments go, it wasn’t exactly auspicious.
But for me, it was an introduction to an idea that I spent the next four decades learning and relearning and eventually sharing in a news environment that was drastically changing:
The best news out there is local. Local people. Local interests. Local needs. Local issues.
Everything else is filler.
I had taken a part-time gig working for the Courier-Democrat’s longtime editor, Bill Newsom, while I was a student at Arkansas Tech. (It was so long ago it still may have been Arkansas Polytechnic College.)
As I remember, the first time Bill handed me a “real” assignment was after a thunderstorm had moved through the area. Lightning had struck a tree in a farmer’s pasture. And, yes, there had been several head of cattle under the tree.
So my first assignment was to get a photograph of dead cows.
Not quite Pulitzer material.
But in looking back after decades of news experience, it was a perfectly valid news photo. Any farmer would feel the financial loss of four dead cows. Then there was the angle of reminding people of the danger of thunderstorms. It was about as hyperlocal as you could get in a small town.
As I would learn later, it also had the benefit of being a “Hey, Mabel” story. That concept arises from the need for a newspaper to offer things that would prompt a dinner-table comment that begins, “Hey, Mabel, did you see this picture in the paper?” That is the old equivalent of “going viral” online.
That sense of “local first” faded in my head in some later newspapers, in Little Rock and Tampa, Florida. I became confident in spelling Nikita Khrushchev, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Eduard Shevardnadze and Karol Wojtyla. (Those are a former leader of the Soviet Union, a U.S. diplomat, a Soviet foreign minister and the birth name of Pope John Paul II.)
So when I returned to a position at the Courier in the 1990s, I needed a refresher course in local news.
That was provided by Bill’s replacement, editor and longtime journalism teacher Roy Ockert.
I think I still have my reporter’s notebook in which I wrote down his key lesson, probably in red and certainly underlined:
“Wire is filler.”
It’s short and to the point, but people outside the business might need a translation of the newsroom jargon. “Wire” means content provided by national news services such as The Associated Press, which of course once came in via telegraph wires. “Filler” is the other content that you fill the spaces around your newspaper’s ads once the “real” news, the local stuff, is placed.
Even before the Internet flooded people’s eyes with what passes for online news, that wire news was available elsewhere. The statewide papers or the day-old Sunday New York Times or Chicago Tribune could provide it.
But neither the wire services, the big papers nor the TV stations ever cared much about what was going on in the local community, unless you had a big tornado or a mass murderer in town.
The local paper is the one doing the heavy lifting with daily stories about local people, local government and school boards, local cops and courts, even local athletics.
Any newsroom, especially at a small-town paper, is really just a continuing education classroom for those who work there. And the teaching could from any direction.
Marilyn Mashburn, the longtime newsroom clerk, was a fount of information about the community and about how the paper had handled different things over the years. That was in addition to being just about the nicest person in the county.
Laura Shull, who dubbed me “Sacrificial” Lamb in my first stint there, knew everyone and everything about the community and had an inside track to government and police matters.
And the education wasn’t just on the job.
When I was a part-timer, Bill Newsom would gather up those of us in the newsroom to walk over to the restaurant at Main and Arkansas for an afternoon soft drink and a casual talk about the day, about work, about the news. They call it team-building these days.
And later, when Rick Fahr was editor, we had some memorable cookouts at his place. Again, it was a time to talk about news and writing and philosophy, as well as some intense games of Trivial Pursuit. One of our stringers, the late Steve Leavell of Dover, almost always provided the winning answer for his team. That sort of camaraderie is tough to find on a seven-day newspaper with everyone on different shifts.
A few examples of the importance of local news stand out in memory. Among them is the woman who was fighting an unreasonably high utility bill, which was reversed after our coverage. Then there were the numerous times a reporter came back from a board or council meeting and said the officials who went into a private executive session kept peeking out the door to see if she was still on watch. We generally were. And one vivid week was when the newspaper covered a youth baseball world series with a special section every day, even on a Monday when we didn’t normally print a newspaper at all.
I also have two favorites in which I played a more direct part in writing.
First, “Their Story, Our History” was a year-long series of interviews with World War II veterans in the area. Editor Rick Fahr started the series, then I continued when he deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with the National Guard.
Second, “Angel with a mustache” was a Sunday story I wrote about an ice cream delivery driver who died tragically, but whose real story was the kind of life that he lived.
As always, the stories that connect best are stories about our neighbors, or perhaps even about our neighbor’s cows.
It’s like my favorite line of dialogue from my favorite TV show — “We’re all stories, in the end; just make it a good one.”
Two Sheeps to the Wind 