Don't blindly romanticize the dying community newspaper

Great piece, to just that critical end, by Pro Publica.

This:

As they vanish, local newspapers are taking on a halo of everything that used to be good about America. They’ve come to symbolize not just halcyon days of neighborly virtues — imagine “It’s a Wonderful Life” if Jimmy Stewart played the editor of the Bedford Falls paper — but the very “bedrock of American democracy.”

Is indeed how the remnant of readership of many newspapers remembers the "golden days" of the print media world.

That remnant, as we all know, is itself older to much older, and Whiter to much Whiter, than the national population.

Daniel Golden, who worked for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Daily News and its post-merger renamed successor for more than 40 years, notes the reality was different, often far different.

Riffing on the situtation described at the top of the story, where the town of Ware was debating in government meeting whether or not to privatize the city's water and sewer system, he goes back to around the time he started in Springfield:

The same focus that inundated readers with information about every committee meeting, crime and high school football game fostered a certain coziness with the area’s power players. Boosterism and conflicts of interest occasionally interfered with telling the full story. It’s possible we would have done a searching examination of a plan to privatize Ware’s water system — unless we risked offending a powerful local figure or business interest.

That's about right.

There were other things as well, things that fortunately I never ran into when a cub or brave at a newspaper under somebody else's editorship and never tried on my own. (Springfield, Massachusetts having an ME insisting that Mount Saint Helens needed to be localized is laughable.)

OR, more seriously, things that today's digital-era reporters bitch about happening then. Not wanting your pay to be dependent on the number of clicks? But a Springfield Daily News reporter back in the 1970s and 1980s was paid by how many different small-town meetings he hit with stories filed.

That said, personally, I'd call Springfield a regional newspaper, more than a community newspaper.