very Wednesday morning, James McDaniel sits along the South Main Street portion of U.S. Highway 11 with a healthy stack of The News- Gazette beside him. He wears a neat white apron with the newspaper’s moniker stitched across the top. He keeps a small, folded tarp tucked away to protect the paper in case of rain, even if there isn’t a cloud in the sky. “You just never know,” he says. He also keeps a broad, never-failing smile on his face and a “hello” on his lips for everyone who passes on the street, whether they buy a paper or not. During the semester I taught at Washington and Lee University last spring, I would buy a couple dozen copies of the weekly newspaper and bring them to my students to read as part of their curriculum. Perhaps it was an odd choice for young people with never-ending access to information on their smartphones. But I wanted the students to understand the importance of localism and community in the digital age. It’s something you don’t always get when you choose what to read or see, rather than being shown what you might otherwise miss. Take, for example, the weekly Lexington Farmers’ Market in McCrum’s parking lot, behind the iconic Southern Inn. My students found out about it by reading the paper, despite its having gone on for weeks under their very noses, less than two blocks from E
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our classroom. As they put it, before seeing it in the local paper, they hadn’t even known to look for it. The trip ended up becoming their first news- writing assignment. They all spread out and interviewed people, like the lilac farmer who produces her own soaps and candles... the quiet Amish family with the abundance of homemade, doughy baked goods; the woodworker... the beekeeper with jars of fresh honey and beeswax... and several local organic farmers. The lesson was that the most trusted news stories come from reporters who are actually part of the localities on which they are reporting. This is something News-Gazette publisher Matt Paxton emphasizes. It’s the reason people in Rockbridge County trust his newsroom more than they do the national news. Last week, Edelman released its annual Trust Barometer study and once again found a steep decline in trust in national media, with 57% of those surveyed globally believing that The importance of localism and community in the digital age [is] something you don’t always get when you choose what to read or see, rather than being shown what you might otherwise miss.
American Consequences
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