Journalism at its best?

As someone commented recently on an email list for copy editors, the the big difference at a smallish weekly is that just about anyone can march into the editor-publisher's office and take him to task for anything in the paper. They also collar him at the grocery store, on the street, or at a high school hockey game. "There is no statute of limitations. Accountability, up close and personal", stated the writer.

And for those reasons, in my view, it is the best form of journalism there is! My first experience of it (after having been an editor of a couple of magazines, including one with a worldwide circulation) was on a country town paper with an editorial staff of two (the owner/manager and me). It came out at 11am on a Thursday morning and if it was a few minutes late there would be a queue stretching down the street. Even the bus to the next town waited on the opposite side of the street though there was no official stop there -- the driver knew his passengers would be in the queue, as well as having to face the people in that tiny town if he arrived without the supply for the general store.

You very quickly get to know how to spell every family name in town, and you are working every hour that you are awake. Sometimes there are national stories too and you see the difference in the care which has to be taken to get things right. Getting the little facts right is also the key to acceptance as an outsider, especially when you print the things they'd rather were not said.

City newspapers used to send young reporters for spells of a few months on small country newspapers but that is yet another tradition which seems to have disappeared, though it helped many borderline publications to survive and gave the bigger newspapers much better journalists.