As publishers in North America celebrate the 75th anniversary of National Newspaper Week - October 4-10 - many have contributed to a campaign to underscore the impact of newspapers to communities large and small.
In an environment of print closures and consolidation, it's a great message, which organisers are emphasising with a success story or two. Earlier this week we told of John and Jenny Garrett who launched the Community Impact Newspaper in Round Rock and Pflugerville, Texas, in 2005 and now - with 20 editions going into almost 1.5 million mailboxes in 31 cities - are setting up their own printing plant.
National Newspaper Week has brought this story from Anthony Warren of businessman Clay Mansell, who defied conventional wisdom in 2010 to start what has become a series of three newspapers based on Clinton, Mississippi.
Launch of the first Courier was a response to an off-the-cuff challenge from then mayor Rosemary Aultman after another local newspaper closed its office. Aultman called a meeting to see if a new paper could be created and after nothing materialised, she urged local resident Mansell - who ran ten of what he called 'treat centres' - to "go to it".
With dentist Ryan Tracy as his business partner, a first issue was published in October 2010, and the paper now comes out twice a month. The issue is put in 75 racks across the city and schoolchildren get copies to take home. "Our papers don't necessarily follow the normal business model, because we didn't know what a normal paper did," Mansell says.
"Living in Clinton and being involved in the community, when the Clinton News closed, I saw how much it hurt us by not having a paper. I thought there was a need, so I took a leap of faith. I saw how well it worked here, and decided to look at launching papers in other places."
The result has been the creation of the Pelahatchie News in 2012, and the Wesson News in 2013, with the Pelahatchie mayor remarking that its existence "makes us real".
"We are real proud of that quote," Mansell says.
Today, the Courier has a circulation of 9000, and 5374 Facebook friends, many of whom logged on to its page following the devastation of the 2014 tornado. "Because we're in a small town, we knew the police and were able to get into the neighborhoods and get pictures, and were able to put the information out before anybody."
Mansell still owns a gourmet popsicle shop, Brick Street Pops, but these days most of his time goes on community events, making sure the Courier is there to report on it. "Hyper-local news sells," he says. "People want to know what's going on in their towns."
And he's working on another title, the Canton News: "We'll try to get an issue out by the end of October, before the election," he says.
Editor and publisher of the Deer Creek Pilot, in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, Ray Mosby says the power of the press is "a very relative thing.
"Everybody understands the power of, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post, but probably less recognised and appreciated is the power of the Deer Creek Pilot and the thousands of other small, community newspapers just like it all across the land."
But he says that it is these little community-minded newspapers that are continuing to thrive, for "some very tangible, observable reasons... not the least of which might be the notion I share that the smaller the community, the more important its newspaper".
For more than 20 years, he has been putting the little country weekly which has been published continuously for 138 years in "what most folks might consider Backwater, USA - the two poorest counties in the poorest state in the union with a combined population of less than 6,500 men, women and children.
"Its is neither flippant nor hyperbolic when I say that little country weekly newspaper is the only news organisation on the planet Earth that gives the first tinker's damn about Sharkey and Issaquena counties, Mississippi. That, folks, is what makes the Deer Creek Pilot mighty, mighty important to those people who call that place home.
"Community newspapers have the power to bring about great good and make a profound difference within their locales. And among the good ones, the ones who endure and even prosper, there is always to be found one common denominator - trust. In a small town the local newspaper is not like the local hardware store. It simply isn't.
"In a small town, every newspaper subscriber thinks he or she is a stockholder, because there exists a real relationship, an implied contract, if you will, between that paper and its readers. They buy your newspaper, advertise in your newspaper, sometimes even when they don't have to, based on a simple precept: They trust you to do your very best to find the truth and to tell it to them."
Mosby says news travels fast in a small town - bad news travels even faster, but all too often that 'news' is no such thing. "All too often, that 'news' is little more than rumour, sometimes made up out of whole cloth and at best some grain of truth exaggerated in its retellings vastly, and often alarmingly out of proportion. In a small town, readers expect their newspaper to separate the wheat from the chaff and then to 'tell it like it is'," he says.
Mosby says he has been "in this crazy business" for 38 years, at both daily and weekly levels. "The greatest single compliment I have ever received came from a salt-of-the-earth little lady who stopped by the office to pick up a hot off the press edition featuring the issue du jour in my little town: 'I've heard all the talk, but I don't believe it until I read in the paper,' she told me. And that, in a nutshell, is the secret to the continued success of community newspapers."
With thanks to Anthony Warren, Ray Mosby and organisers of National Newspaper Week
Pictured: Clinton Courier publisher Clay Mansell and staff member Kristen Burkhalter with one of the biweekly editions (Photo by Anthony Warren)
On our homepage: a cartoon by Ricky Nobile, longtime syndicated cartoonist and newspaper professional