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Richard Campbell: In community newspapers, we have a situation where I think a lot of them are doing fairly well. They have their struggles, too. But we have over 100, I think, that are still thriving. They've become increasingly important as local, traditional, commercial newspapers downsize.

Bob Speer: 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: We are the voice of our community. We try to give them relevant information about issues that are important to our community. They don't get that in the mainstream newspapers. We cover the things that are important to our communities, 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, and would go into the details of trying to identify 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: 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. It's not necessarily the view of just one medium, or one ownership that owns all of the mediums in a given market.