Community Voices: Weekly Newspapers

Richard Campbell – Author, Media and Culture
In community newspapers we have a situation where I think a lot of them are doing fairly well. I mean, they have their struggles too. But we have over 100 I think that are still thriving. They’ve becoming increasingly important as local, traditional commercial newspapers downsize.

Bob Speer – Editor, Chico News and Review

They provide a community-based alternative to the dailies. They tend to be more oriented toward in-depth reporting and feature stories. Obviously as a weekly you can’t provide the same level of news coverage that a daily does, but you can comment upon what the daily does. You can critique the daily. You can suggest a different concept of community than the daily does. 

Michael House – President, Chicago Defender

We are the voice of our community, and we try to give them relevant information about issues that are important to our community. You know, they don’t get that in the mainstream newspapers, or we cover the things that are important to our communities and from a standpoint of a black perspective. What we see and what we think is a little bit different than what we sometimes see reported in the mainstream newspapers. The mainstream media would never look at it from this perspective. Only the Defender would look at it from the standpoint of who killed Mya, you know, and would go into the details of trying to identify, you know, in our community or whatever, who’s responsible for this. It may not be front-page stuff for the Sun Times or the Tribune, but it’s front page in our community. 

Bob Speer

One of the problems with daily newspapers today is that they’ve gone from being family-owned to being corporate-owned, which means that they have become responsible to shareholders. When newspapers start becoming responsible to stockholders, that’s when they start to stray from their real goal. In a family-owned business you can say OK, we’re going to cut back and we’ll be happy with 5% profit, because it’s tough times and we don’t want to fire people. We don’t want to lay people off and we want to be ready when the economy turns around. And you want to cover the news. You want to serve the community. 

Michael House

So I think we as a vehicle that’s independently owned can always voice our opinions and let our community know that this is the real story that has to be told. And it’s not necessarily the view of just one medium or one ownership that owns all of the mediums in a given market.

Bedford/St. Martin's Video Transcript