美国国家公共电台 NPR How Small Town Papers Have Kept Community Trust

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

There's been a lot of talk lately about restoring trust in American journalism¹. Iowa Public Radio's Clay Masters reports that mainstream² media could maybe learn from small-town newspapers about being authentic³ and winning trust.

CLAY MASTERS, BYLINE⁴: Mabel, an English Setter, snoozes on the floor at the back of The Storm Lake Times newsroom. That's where Dolores Cullen shows me back issues of the newspaper her husband Art started with his brother John in 1990.

DOLORES CULLEN: Art is awesome⁵ at headlines. Oh, calf⁶ born with two heads? That was a good one. Oh, I'm showing you especially the animal stories.

MASTERS: Dolores writes features. She's an illustrator and takes photos, too. Her son Tom is also a reporter. Flip⁷ through this twice-a-week paper for this town of around 11,000, and you find it still has a robust⁸ classifieds section. There's an ad looking for farm drainage workers. And it's a good bet that Tyson meat packing plant is hiring. There's even a section devoted⁹ to local birthdays. By the way, Landon DeMoss just turned 11.

It's the paper's editorials, though, that recently gained national attention. They won a Pulitzer Prize a few months ago for challenging powerful corporate¹⁰ agribusiness interests in the state. Editor Art Cullen says newspapers like his are the thread that hold the fabric¹¹ of a small town together.

ART CULLEN: We inform each other through the newspaper about the reality of Storm Lake, not the uber-reality of Facebook or Twitter.

MASTERS: For years, Cullen says, the biggest story here has been the booming immigrant population. Many small towns in Iowa are shrinking. This one is growing. The local meat packing industry attracts workers from around the world. More than 20 languages are spoken in its elementary school. Cullen says the paper is respected.

CULLEN: They know we're honest, and they know we love Storm Lake. And they know that we stick to the facts of the story and that we will argue, argue, argue on our editorial page.

EMILIA MARROQUIN: If you don't find them, they find you (laughter).

MASTERS: That's school board member Emilia Marroquin. She says, despite language barriers, The Storm Lake Times does a good job of getting a wide range of perspectives on local issues. Marroquin has been quoted in the paper about a dozen times. She says the paper's features on kids in town are just good for the schools.

MARROQUIN: And if they see all the kids doing something good, OK, it's time for myself to do something and be on the newspaper.

MASTERS: Christina Smith is a journalism professor at Georgia College who has worked for and studied small-town newspapers. Smith says they're not motivated by money alone but by the communities themselves. She says it gives them staying power.

CHRISTINA SMITH: These type of media have been around for - since the frontier days. And descriptive statistics show that they're doing relatively¹² well in the chaotic¹³ media landscape.

MASTERS: Chaotic in part because big-box retailers¹⁴ squeeze out local businesses, all of which means fewer ads in the paper. Again, Art Cullen at The Storm Lake Times.

CULLEN: These are very resilient papers. They refuse to die. But they have one foot in the grave and one foot on a banana peel. And that's because that's the status of the communities they're operating in.

MASTERS: Cullen says circulation is up and has reached about 3,000 copies per issue since winning that Pulitzer. And he just signed a book deal. For NPR News, I'm Clay Masters in Des Moines.