Rural papers, especially those with courage, are a beacon to journalism, Judy Muller tells Texans

Good rural newspapers are a beacon to the rest of the business, which needs more people from rural America to tell its stories accurately, journalism professor and broadcast journalist Judy Muller told community-newspaper folks at the 100th annual meeting of the Texas Panhandle Press Association, which ended today in the picturesque town of Canadian, population 2,233.

“You’re a shining beacon at a very hard time in our profession,” said Muller, right, who teaches at the University of Southern California and is the author of a forthcoming book, Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns, to be published next spring by the University of Nebraska Press.

Muller’s travels for the volume took her to places like Concrete, Wash. (“Cementing the Future for 100 Years”), where Jason Miller started a paper after the isolated town had been without one for 18 years, she said. At a local parade, in which Muller rode on the Concrete Herald’s float, “People were coming up to him and crying, and shaking his hand,” she recalled. “He has brought back such pride. That’s what a community paper is.”

Journalists in major mainstream media centers have little grasp of the realities of life in such places, Muller said. “I argue all the time for more geographic diversity in our newsrooms,” she said, and for “more kids from rural areas” in USC’s Annenberg School of Communication.

Muller said community newspapers are not “some quaint bit of Americana that is just going to fade away,” and will keep attracting investors like M.E. Sprengelmeyer, who bought the Guadalupe County Communicator in Santa Rosa, N.M., after his job at the Rocky Mountain News ended along with that paper. But refugees from dailies shouldn’t expect a laid-back life, Muller said. “It’s just about killing him,” she said of Sprengelmeyer. “He didn’t know he had to work every day.” The audience of mostly weekly newspaper folks laughed knowingly.

“You live next to the people you write about, and that takes tremendous courage, to report the truth,” Muller said. She recounted stories of the courage displayed by the late Tom Gish of The Mountain Eagle of Whitesburg, Ky., and the local editor, Laurie Ezzell Brown of The Canadian Record, who with her family won the 2007 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based at the University of Kentucky. Muller said those stories, about taking on secretive school officials, abusive police and intimidating coal companies, are inspirational, but “When I hear stories like that . . . I don’t know if I would have had the courage to stay.”