Rural media (Part I): A new feature reporting from the pages of small-town newspapers

Office of the Del Norte Triplicate, a thrice-weekly paper in Crescent City, California
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2019

When I travel to rural places (as well as urban ones, for that matter), I make a point of reading the local news. I like to see what the issues du jour are in particular rural regions, and I blog about what I find as often as I can.  Some recent examples of that are here and here.  My travels throughout California in July have given me ample opportunity to consume several different local (county) newspapers, so I'm going to highlight some of what I read here:

The San Luis Obispo Tribune published an editorial headlined, "Reckless drivers, drunks and confederate flags don't belong on the Oceano Dunes," on July 19.  Here's an excerpt, about a recent Coastal Commission meeting in the area, which considered the fate of the popular outdoor park where six people have died this year in ATV/off-roading accidents:

Yes, the Coastal Commission agreed to maintain the status quo at the popular off-road park for at least one more year. But it also made it clear that it expects improvement. 

And if the commission takes its job to protect and enhance the coastline at all seriously — and wants to retain any credibility with opponents of the state vehicular recreation area — it will treat this as a last chance.

For as much as supporters have tried to portray the Oceano Dunes as a safe, welcoming, family-friendly place, the PR isn’t working.

It’s hard to characterize a place as safe and family-friendly when there have been six fatalities and a shooting so far this year.

And welcoming?

Sorry, but even a single Confederate flag on the back of a pickup is enough to create the impression that the entire off-roading community is a bunch of racist good ol’ boys who come over from the [Central] Valley to drink and raise hell — leaving the locals to eat their dust and clean up their mess.

* * *

For many, the [2019] deaths confirm the park is an inherently lawless, dangerous place — the term “Wild West” gets used a lot — where there’s little supervision and almost anything goes.

As we’ve said before, we don’t believe the increase in fatalities is a reason to close the park — but it definitely is a reason to figure out what the heck is going on and do whatever it takes to make the park safer.

I could excerpt more, but I think readers will get the picture. 

The (Sonoma County) Press Democrat ran this story by Julie Johnson on July 26 under the headline, "Mendocino marijuana raids reflect California’s stepped-up enforcement on illegal operators."  Here are a couple of key excerpts about what went down in what has been called the Emerald Triangle.  Specifically, the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office "cut down more than 42,000 marijuana plants on nearly 30 properties in the Eel River watershed." This is reportedly the first "major multiagency operation investigating illegal cultivation and environmental crimes to take place" in the county since the state legalized marijuana.  While the state has granted licenses to some 500 entities to grow marijuana in Mendocino County, thousands of unlicensed marijuana farms are believed to exist.

Cannabis industry leaders here said the operation was premature for an industry struggling to adapt to new regulations and that it felt like a resumption of the heavily militarized law enforcement campaigns that for decades targeted marijuana growers in these hills and valleys.

But Sheriff Tom Allman said his teams focused on sites where they spotted evidence of serious environmental crimes such as water theft and polluting the watershed with trash, fuels and pesticides. The investigations targeted properties where people had not even applied for local permits or state licenses to cultivate, he said.

“Is it marijuana enforcement or is it environmental enforcement?” Sheriff Tom Allman said. “There’s a difference, and I think the tide is turning.”

In the aftermath of legalization, marijuana industry leaders had hoped that enforcement of the state’s cannabis cultivation laws would fundamentally change. Where once they had encountered teams of camouflaged and armed peace officers investigating criminal behavior, they envisioned civil operations run by code enforcement officers using warnings, legal notices, fines and penalties to hold people accountable.

The Times-Standard (Eureka/Humboldt County) on July 6 led with this headline, "County buildings aren't up to standards."  The story by Sonia Waraich features these paragraphs: 

Humboldt County has been failing to make public facilities accessible to people with disabilities for years, according to a report from the county's civil grand jury.  

The county has been on hot water with the U.S. Dept. of Justice for over a decade because it has continuously failed to meet deadlines set by the department to bring county buildings up the the standards laid out in the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to the Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury report "Here We Go Again" released Friday morning.  The ADA states that government buildings need to be usable for people with disabilities and modifications need to be made to make them accessible.  

The following is a quote from the report: 

As the County approaches the final deadline in the Consent Decree to remediate the remaining facilities and curb ramps, it seems unlikely that work will be completed on time.  Many earlier deadlines have been missed and a number of projects are still out for bid.  

Nearly 1700 curb ramps still need to be remediated, according to the report. 

In it's July 3, 2019 issue, the Curry Coastal Pilot (Oregon) ran a front-page story announcing the paper's new ownership under the headline, "Turning a new page."  The story, which features a photo of Carol Hungerford, begins:

Hello, Brookings and Crescent City!  We're privileged to be the new owners of the Curry Costal Pilot and the Del Norte Triplicate.   

As a native Oregonian, I love this coast and its iconic smaller towns  We are excited at the opportunity to learn about and become part of the fabric of Brookings and Crescent City.   

My husband, Steve, and I have been working toward this goal of purchasing these two promising community news outlets for four months.  

Steve created Country Media nearly 20 years ago because of his passion for community news and service.  After half a century working at daily and weekly newspapers of all sizes, his zest for this business continues unabated.  

My education and work experience had been centered in the arts and arts management.  But early on I agreed to help Steve operate our newspaper company, and I've never regretted that decision.   

Over the past two decades, we've built our business to include some 15 nondaily newspapers and 15 years, associated websites serving communities of various sizes in four states.  So we have a strong background in finding a good fit between our publications and their communities.   

For now, our prime focus with these two newspapers is to make them sustainable, to ensure that Brookings and Crescent City have long-term newspapers they can rely on for non-judgmental, accurate and unbiased news coverage.  

The column then goes on to explain that Country Media bought the two papers our bankruptcy.  Curry is Oregon's most southwesterly county, and its population is 22,364.  Del Norte County, California, home of the sister paper, the Triplicate, has a population of 28,610.

Speaking of media ownership, to close out this initial post on the rural media, let me turn to this New York Times story from August 1 about the last issue of the Warroad (Minnesota) Pioneer, printed this past May.  Warroad, population 1,781, is in far northern Minnesota, a few miles south of Canada, and its paper had a distribution of about 1,100.   Richard Fausset's story notes that the Warroad paper joined some 2000 United States papers that have ceased to publish over the last decade and a half.  A study by UNC research, "The Expanding News Desert," found that “there is simply not enough digital or print revenue to pay for the public service journalism that local newspapers have historically provided.”  Fauset writes:  

In Warroad, The Pioneer was full of soft-focus features on residents, reprinted news releases, photos of fishermen with their outsize catches, and news of awards won by children and Shriners. There were the occasional stories, too, about city officials, the school board and local sports.

And so, Fauset notes, the closure of the paper leaves a big hole:

No hometown paper to print the obituaries from the Helgeson Funeral Home. No place to chronicle the exploits of the beloved high school hockey teams. No historical record for the little town museum, which had carefully kept the newspaper in boxes going back to 1897.

And what about the next government scandal, the next school funding crisis? Who would be there? Who would tell?

A prior post about Warroad, as hockey powerhouse, is here.