Abstract
Let’s be frank: It took me months to finish reading this book. It wasn’t because the writing is poor; it’s not. Author Dave Hoekstra was a Chicago Sun-Times columnist and critic for nearly 30 years and has written other books. It wasn’t because I was uninterested in the subject; I was once a community newspaper editor and have taken an interest in literally all aspects of community newspapers since. It also wasn’t because the writing is boring, at least in the usual sense of the word. But it’s a slog nonetheless because it’s like 60 pounds of potatoes in a 40-pound bag and only somewhat better organized.
Doug Burns, vice president for news at Herald Publishing Co. (Carroll, Iowa), told Hoekstra while he worked on this book that “either it will be an instruction manual or inspirational book that will have ideas that have helped preserve or resurrect newspapers” (p. 10). Right up front, this book is not an instruction manual on saving community journalism; neither the book’s substance nor its structure lends itself to being a “manual.” For that I would still recommend Saving Community Journalism: The Path to Profitability, by Penelope Muse Abernathy (North Carolina, 2014), still about as relevant as when first published.
Hoekstra’s book comes much closer to being “inspirational,” though because of portraits it paints of small-town editors/publishers persevering against all odds for decades and even through six generations, usually for little income, rather than brilliant ideas to save newspapers. (The book offers precious few of those.) In fact, if NRJ readers’ students ask, “Why would anyone devote her life to covering a small town for a small salary?” This book is among the best in the recent boomlet of academic books whose authors finally discovered community journalism after it stared them in the face for decades.
Hoekstra conducted obviously lengthy interviews, apparently almost all on site, at 15 individual newspapers and two small newspaper chains, in Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, as well as a few other people. Fourteen chapters are titled, “The Commitment,” “The Price of Community,” “Serving History,” “Stop the Presses! Technology Has Come to Town,” “Migratory Paths and Connections,” “Old-School Family Business,” “Seeds of Change,” “Selling a Family Newspaper,” “Outsourcing and Rural America,” “Insourcing Spirit,” “The Truth About Fake News,” “Virus Crisis, 2020,” “Nonprofit Model,” and “The Future.” While some of these titles would seem to be self-explanatory, others are not, and Hoekstra is silent on what will or won’t be included in any chapter. Chapters are not divided into sections with headings, nor do chapters have anything other than the most general introductions or conclusions, if any at all. For example, the concluding paragraph of the short “Migratory Paths and Connections” chapter (5) says only, “That’s old-fashioned Americana.” (The book has no photographs, let alone those of the dozens of people he interviewed or the newspaper buildings he visited, making it very difficult to develop mental pictures of these people and their places. And it has no index.) While reading it, I kept wondering if the book would have been better organized as one newspaper per chapter, like Loren Ghiglione’s The Buying and Selling of America’s Newspapers (1984)—and thinking that would have been a huge improvement, even if it had limitations of its own.
Thus, this book is the farthest thing from a community newspaper “manual” or book of survival tips; it makes no effort to make clear what he was trying to find out, what he did and did not find out, or what community publishers are and are not getting right, other than perhaps: find passionate people who work cheap. The book fails to tell the reader what doesn’t work, or what facts or idea his interview subjects got wrong; none apparently ever made a major mistake. Granted a more critical or analytical approach would have made these 284 pages even longer, but Hoekstra also could have edited out a lot of his data dump. (As Blaise Pascal wrote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”)
Among the boomlet in community journalism books, Andrew Conte’s book, Death of the Daily News: How Citizen Gatekeepers Can Save Local Journalism (Pittsburgh, 2022), at least makes a proposal about making the most of citizen journalists after presenting an exhaustive case about what one community lost when its daily paper closed. But Hoekstra’s book and most other boomlet books mostly devote hundreds of pages to only say, in endless ways, that local U.S. communities—democratic and capitalistic they are—each need their local news media. And neither I nor most other intelligent, observant people need 284 pages to tell us that.