Local journalism still vital, from dusty towns to capital cities
Come Tuesday, Bob Foos, in the parlance of old journalists, will put the Webb City (Mo.) Sentinel to bed for the last time.
The Sentinel is my hometown newspaper. Where I grew up, even small towns with just a few thousand souls had a local paper. Now? The Sentinel is one of the dead-last remainders for independent journalism on a small scale.
Meanwhile, in Hartford, the vulture capitalists who owns 32 percent of the company (Tribune Publishing) that owns America’s Oldest Continuously Published Newspaper (the Courant), has announced they’re selling the newspaper’s building at 285 Broad St., where many of the print journalists now operating in the state cut their teeth.
It’s just a building, but journalists working without a newsroom means there’s no rapid-fire give-and-take among colleagues that even the best journalism movies fail to capture. Journalists may be curmudgeonly know-it-alls, but having each other to spark guts and creativity helps create a newspaper.
Tribune has already closed other newspaper offices in Allentown, Penn., and Orlando, Fla. These are dark times for a newspaper that is, as says one of the books devoted to its history, “older than the country.” They’re not much brighter for the Webb City Sentinel, which started life as a daily in 1879, the same year the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad came to town.
Long ago, Webb City was Something. A giant hunk of lead ore was uncovered by a farmer and the town set out to ride a boom it would see precisely once. A complicated web of mine tunnels was dug, with mules that would be lowered down the hole, never to see above ground again. It’s said those mules developed uncanny night vision. Bars outnumbered churches, 10 to one.
But putting all one’s egg in a basket — or dropping those eggs down a mine hole — just begs for a decline. By the late 1950s, Webb City had worn out its Something, and settled into being a twostoplight town hard by the Missouri Ozarks. The Sentinel was sliding down the greased pole to the newspaper cemetery, but 41 years ago a bearded hippie (that’s what the locals called Bob, before they got to know him) moved in and turned the little throw-away into a paper of record.
The hippie had worked for larger news organizations, but his love was community journalism — the honor rolls, the senior center menus, and the local holiday lights contest.
Bob could have worked anywhere, but he chose a dusty little town that needed a newspaper. In the last few decades, every single American newspaper has struggled, some more and some less than the Sentinel. Bob hasn’t had an assistant editor for years. Earlier this year, his long-time bookkeeper mentioned retirement, and Bob decided it was time for him, too. He tried to sell the paper, but there were no buyers. He plans to move the news online after the first of the year
What Bob did for that newspaper — and that town — with graceful photography, no-nonsense reporting, and ridiculously long hours cannot be overstated. From the time he took over, the town nearly doubled in size. New industry moved in. Those old raggedy mining shacks were either replaced or renovated. That’s not all because of the Sentinel, but the newspaper was the tie that held the town together.
It won’t be a news desert, per se. The nearby Joplin Globe (owned by Alabamabased Community Newspaper Holdings) still covers the region, but what goes uncovered is the news people are looking for, such as when sewer service will come to Fountain Road, or what’s available at the local farmers market. Things fall through the cracks when there simply isn’t the staff.
That’s being played out on a larger stage in Hartford. Alden, a New York-based vulture capitalist firm, is draining the life from a national resource. That is their MO. They suck the blood out of newspapers, and then leave them to die. In September, the Hartford City Council passed a resolution that supported the Courant, and pleaded for new ownership. But so far, Alden is making too much money keeping Tribune’s holdings together.
Vulture don’t care, and so they don’t. Meanwhile, just when people need accurate news the most, Courant journalists have been furloughed, winnowed out with buyouts, and forced to take permanent pay cuts. Ac
cording to the Courant Guild, the newsroom included 100 people three years ago. They’re down to 52. Pew Research Center says that since 2008, half of newspaper newsroom employees have left or been pushed out. Those are numbers from before the pandemic, which has slashed
newspapers’advertising revenue through the bone.
Some Courant journalists who remain on staff have created a website asking for support. Despite the odds, these brave souls are putting out newspapers in desperate need of new owners, people with an understanding of pandemics, local board
meetings, and the ties that bind. That’s true everywhere. Hartford. Webb City. Everywhere.
Susan Campbell worked at the Courant full-time from 1986 to 2012. She returned as a freelancer, a job that ended when the Courant let a slate of freelancers go in March 2020.