Play uses painting as partial metaphor for print journalism, which still thrives in small towns

The importance of small-town newspapers has been brought to the stage by the University of Wyoming's Snowy Range Summer Theatre, which in July will present "Waiting for a Chinook," a play based on a painting of the same name by Charles Russell (1864-1926) who painted landscapes mostly set in the western U.S. The painting depicts a starving and beaten steer standing in the snow in the winter of 1886-87 while wolves wait and the steer hopes for a chinook, a warm wind off the mountains that will melt the snow and expose pasture. (Painting from charlesrussell.org)

"In the wake of the drastic declines suffered by metro daily newspapers in 2008," the play "follows Vince, a disillusioned city reporter, who returns to his boyhood Western town to search for place and meaning in the writings of his late father, Cliff, a Wyoming country editor," reports the twice-weekly Cody Enterprise.

The play was written as a fictional memoir by Gregory Hinton, who grew up in Cody, 350 miles from the university in Laramie, and was the son of G.C. “Kip” Hinton, a prize-winning photojournalist and editor of the Enterprise in 1956-62. Hinton said, “It was irresistible not to compare the Russell watercolor – essentially a political cartoon – to the decline in print journalism. The daily reporter just might be the 21st century version of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s 'Death of a Salesman.' So many newspapers have stopped their presses, with thousands of newspaper jobs lost and never to return.” (About 130 of the more than 8,000 paid-circulation newspapers in the U.S. have ceased opublication since 2008.)

Jim Hicks, retired editor/publisher of the Buffalo Bulletin, told the Enterprise that communities without hometown papers are communities without souls, and that community papers have repeatedly disproven forecasts of doom. “Expansion of radio into small towns was going to kill the community newspaper," Hicks said. "Then television was the death call for the little paper, and now it’s the Internet in all its forms of personal communication. But, somehow, objective reporting and journalism ethics keep the printed word afloat in most of these towns and villages. Citizens recognize they have no substitute for an effective watchdog of local government than their hometown paper." (Read more)