In the 1950s, small-town newspapers that practiced community journalism seemed not only larger than life but also life itself to us paperboys who delivered them. Readers and advertisers and most of those who ended up on its pages valued newspapers. They were part and parcel of a community’s means of talking to itself and with one another.
The small Oklahoma daily that I delivered in my hometown has long since shrunk to a weekly. It no longer prints on a flat-bed press in the back of the downtown newspaper building, where the paperboys folded usual 4-to-8 pages into “star-shaped” little missiles, the better to launch them onto porches, into bushes, and onto roofs.
If the latter possibilities occurred, some subscribers—emphasis on some—valued their newspaper enough to seek out the landing site and not even call the office to complain.
Much has changed.
As reported by and acknowledged in the media, the travails of The Devil Strip, an upstart Akron publication that calls itself a magazine but looks suspiciously like a tabloid newspaper since it is printed on newsprint, is now on life support. Events concerning its demise reveal the truth and value of the homily “reporting begins at home.” This was a favorite of Charlene Nevada, among the best reporters/writers I’ve ever known. She could report and write anything and everything well, from city hall to crime to the making of crème brûlée. In dictionaries, her mug shot accompanies the definition of “versatile.”
Char had a nose for news, rumors, and gossip. She worked the beats she reported for the Akron Beacon Journal like a bloodhound on a scent and was so tough she could make former mayor Don Plusquellic, Akron’s toughest and best ever, practically whimper. Usually, when it came to reporters and Plusquellic, it was the other way around.
Ms. Nevada did not limit her reporting to city hall, the cop shop, or the test kitchen. She needed to know everything that was going on in her newsroom. Though retired from journalism, she is exactly the type that The Devil Strip needed and, apparently, lacked.
It came as a shock to the small Devil Strip staff when the Board of Directors informed it, out of the blue, that their publication lacked the funds to continue. Newspapers and failures frequent the same sentences far and wide and have for years. The reasons are myriad and complex but the bottom line is: The world changed. Now, as McKay Coppins’ “The Men Who Are Killing America’s Newspapers” in the November issue of The Atlantic suggests, those attacking newspapers are likely to be vulture capitalists such as those at hedge fund Alden Global Capital. They have not a scintilla of interest in journalism and, thus, are the opposite from those invested in The Devil Strip.
There is one similarity between Alden Global Capital and The Devil Strip—at least its directors. It is the search for cash. Alden Global slashes staffs and burns down even big-name newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune in the process of making money for investors. Devil Strip directors are seeking answers as stated sharply in the headline atop the Beacon Journal’s Sunday, October 24, story: “Questions are mounting as Devil Strip directors look into why it ran out of cash.” The devil is indeed in the details, which according to the well reported story by Jennifer Pignolet and Doug Livingston, include many more questions than answers—at least to this point.
Newspapers, large and small, can be notorious hypocrites when it comes to demanding transparency of those on which they report yet offering little of it when it comes to their business. It should have been even more incumbent on The Devil Strip to be transparent as glass since its founder and publisher Chris Horne transitioned it to community-owned co-op, with a multi-stakeholder, community membership program. Think public media (National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting System) but with a smaller, more intimately involved audience. It all sounded so promising until it wasn’t. (If not quite the equal of Green Bay Packers’ fans opportunity to own stock in the team.)
Horne moved to Akron from Georgia and started The Devil Strip in 2014. I think I met him during a Save the University of Akron Press (UAP) rally about that time. My political biography on Don Plusquellic probably was in limbo at the time since UAP was the publisher. He seemed interested in the book and spoke of an interview for his publication. Though UAP survived and the Plusquellic book was published, The Devil Strip, to my knowledge did not write about it, and I know the interview never occurred. I thought about this when I received a notice from the three remaining directors of nine that staff had been laid off, including editor Jessica Holbrook who joined the publication in July from The Canton Repository. Subsequent media coverage revealed Horne had stepped aside after a request by the staff. The Beacon Journal story addressed this.
I won’t go into the details because, frankly, they are opaque. Community foundations, including two of the strongest, The Knight Foundation and the GAR Foundation, had supported the staff-community partnership concept, as had others in the community. Some of those who were quoted in Pignolet and Livingston’s story have now backed away because of the uncertainty of what happened and what the future might hold.
Though I believe in the idea, and Emily Dressler, one of my brightest students when I advised The Buchtelite, the University of Akron student newspaper, was both a writer for The Devil Strip and one of the directors who is attempting to save it, I have not supported it financially. Instead, my wife, Jacquelyn, and I support an endowment for writing and literature at Hiram College, because I know where the money is going.
I can only hope more details will become available as to where the money went at The Devil Strip. Among Emily Dressler’s duties at the publication was writing what Sonia Potter, who was digital manager, once described as “our famous restroom review column.” I catch myself trying to type “restaurant review column” but then I remind myself that Emily is a columnist flush with unique ideas, including her “Urine Luck.”
My concern is that a theoretically good idea for community journalism—supported by foundations, memberships, and grants instead of subscriptions, online paywalls and advertising—has been flushed away by a mess vaguely resembling vulture capitalism.
