Community journalism starts with community
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Editorial by Adam Strunk
Running a local newspaper can be one of the most frustrating, worthwhile, mundane, exciting, demanding, rewarding endeavors you can take on. Sounds great, kids, doesn’t it?
This year, we received the honor of a request to tell our story as part of National Newspaper Week. The week serves to highlight the important work local newspapers do in their communities and remind people nationwide of the value local news provides.
What’s our story? Many of you know it already.
We were dumb kids, or in Bruce’s case, a dumb man, who started a business in Newton, Kansas, with the idea that a community would pay for and support a locally owned newspaper filled with local news.
Start-ups are increasingly common today. In 2015, our idea was regularly greeted with the question, “You’re doing what?”
Naivete rarely gets rewarded in the business world. But for us, it was what allowed us to move forward.
There’s a statistic that is bandied around. Roughly two out of 10 Americans have met or spoken to a journalist.
It usually gets cited in various think pieces about the decreasing trust of the public in the media.
People who’ve met a journalist are much more likely to trust what’s reported in the news than people who have not.
We don’t doubt that statistic. But we don’t think it holds quite true in Harvey County. We don’t think we’d be in business if that statistic was true.
When we opened, we hired Wendy Nugent, a long-time area journalist who’d met and interviewed residents of the county. Since working for us, she’s written roughly 2,800 feature stories over her nine years. She’s met a lot of people.
Bruce Behymer, the marketing dude, was a lifelong Sedgwick native. And he knew just about everybody. It’s still difficult to have a conversation with him in a public setting without at least three people interrupting to say hi.
Three of us moved here for the first time, though Lindsey Young did a stint at Bethel College many years ago.
As we opened, we endeavored to be everywhere, speaking at local clubs and senior centers, even selling subscriptions from a truck tailgate at the farmers market.
We did this because we knew that if we could just communicate with many people what we were doing, people would believe in it and support us.
Over the years, all of us got to know the community and the readers.
We’d think that a good many of you who take this paper have spoken with us on the phone when buying a subscription, stopping in the office to chat, or doing an interview with one of our reporters. You might have had us take your ticket or pour you a beer at our annual Blues, Brews and Barbecue concert. You might have attended one of our monthly Press Club mingles. We invite subscribers to come by the office and come to a mingle, in part so they can get to know us better.
We’d hazard to say, at this point, the majority of our readers know at least someone at the paper.
That’s by design. And that’s been important to us.
To us, local journalism isn’t about watching a community succeed and struggle from afar. To us, local journalism is a way to participate in a community we care about by providing useful information, as well as a little bit of accountability, entertainment, and joy along the way.
We want what’s best for the community, because it’s our community, filled with our readers, our friends, and our neighbors.
There’s a joke that everyone hates Congress but loves their congressperson. To us, we’ve seen that with the paper. Many of our readers are skeptical of national media, but they support the paper. “You’re one of the good ones,” is a compliment that we’re perhaps happy to get but makes us cringe just a tad, as well.
We’re not doing things too much differently than some bigger publications. But we are visible, accessible and around.
And in doing so and in covering issues the way we’ve done over the years, we have the trust of many of you. A lot of trust. That’s not something we take lightly.
So if we’ve earned anything over our time and have to leave with one thought, it would be that we believe newspapers have a key impact on our communities. They keep the government honest. They keep people informed and connected. They provide a snapshot of life, far outside social media bubbles.
They advocate, desire to right wrongs, and seek to make where they operate a better place.
We thank you all for giving us that opportunity, we thank you for your support, and we look forward to filling this role for many years in the future.
We hope you view our publication not only as a window to the community, but an important part of its structure.
And if you have thoughts, as always, you know where to find us.
Adam Strunk has served as the managing editor of “Harvey County Now” since its founding in 2015. He is a partner and director of editorial content with Kansas Publishing Ventures and serves on the board as legislative director for the Kansas Press Association.