Investigative: Local Newspapers

No News Is Bad News

By Kathryn Dawson 

Lake Placid overflows with copies of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise but is it really an adequate replacement for a larger newspaper?

            “A hometown newspaper feels the pulse of a community,” The Lake Placid News wrote in their article “Being a hometown paper is special.” It listed the benefits of a local paper, including that “A great personal scrapbook is composed of photos and newspaper clippings,” which a larger newspaper will not provide.  

The Adirondack Daily Enterprise

            That’s assuming the articles are worth scrapbooking. The Press Republican’s article “NSA skiers win at Eastern Regional Junior Finals”(sic) contained Associated Press style mistakes that would make even my lenient editor cringe, not to mention grammatical errors, and was published with a picture of a racer unrelated to the story. Similarly, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise published a minutiae-ridden article, “Woodward goes 4 for 4” and mislabeled a poorly chosen photo of Hannah Feinberg as Katelyn Madden. Aylin Woodward was also upset at being misquoted. None of those articles managed to use correct capitalization.

While The Wall Street Journal will not print a photo of your baby’s science fair prize, the absence of a local paper does not imply a shortage of all local news. People living in larger cities settle for celebrating their personal news through local television. Like local papers, television fills dead air with segments about the Scholar-Athlete of the Week and high school sports, which can be recorded for your compulsive record keeping.

            A local newspaper provides information on community events, meeting times, and achievements. It has a strong readership base and improves its town’s organization and solidarity. Although it is vital to a community, equally vital is a larger paper that spans regional, national and international news.

Large newspapers have exponentially better resources than local papers, so they can provide more thorough articles covering a broader range of information. They have a more job applicants to choose from, so they can choose more talented and experienced writers, and they can afford to employ more fact-checkers and reporters. Their prestige attracts good applicants, freelance writers and interns, and expands their range of sources.

            Lake Placid has commendably accessible local news; the Adirondack Daily Enterprise can be found in most stores along with the free publication Adirondack Sports and Fitness. However, the only store carrying the New York Times, USA Today, or Washington Post was Newman’s News. The next best option was The Bookstore Plus, which had a copy of the Economist amongst its various interest magazines. An employee there directed me to Starbucks, where I could peruse a worn and misfolded copy of The New York Times.

            “We used to have a whole shelf of [larger newspapers]” said an employee at Newman’s News. Then they changed to the distributor Today’s News, presumably (since the old distributor is still in business) because that “whole shelf” lacked readership and sales. That leaves Lake Placid with one tiny rack of large newspapers at one store. The employee gave me detailed numbers on their sales of The New York Times: between “a lot” and “a few,”depending on the season.

In an age of electronic news, the dearth of large newspapers in Lake Placid is acceptable as long as residents are proactive about collecting news and resist becoming isolated, apathetic or ignorant.