Other people may be addicted to sugar or sex. Me, I’m addicted to small-town newspapers, the more picayune the better. Whenever I visit a tiny town, the first thing I do is find a newspaper stand, where I plunk down two or three quarters for a copy of the local gazette, to find out what’s going on, what the residents are talking about.Maybe it’s because I grew up in the small town of Fairbanks, Alaska — where I cut my journalism teeth on the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, with its articles about moose sightings and curling bonspiels and its regular “Sourdough Jack Sez” column — that I have a soft spot for what other people might dismiss as insignificant rags.
Whatever the reason, I still enjoy reading everything from the Skamania County Pioneer to the Goldendale Sentinel, with their fuzzy photos showing someone handing someone else an oversized check and their features on everything from rooster-crowing contests and spelling bees to county fairs and students making the dean’s list.
Maybe it’s the relatively low percentage of crime stories combined with the unpretentious prose that makes the papers so appealing. Maybe it’s their neighborly, we’re-all-in-this-together tone combined with the outspoken letters to the editor and weekly recordings of births and deaths. Now what could be more significant than that?
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