National TV host Rachel Maddow champions for the importance of community newspapers

While reporting the story of a rural community newspaper in North Dakota that has kept on publishing despite a devastating fire, national television host Rachel Maddow used the opportunity "to point out the value that newspapers in small towns provide and urged her viewers to subscribe to their local paper or gift a subscription to a kid they know," Kris Kerzman reports for the Grand Forks Herald. The offices of the weekly New Rockford Transcript were gutted by fire recently, but that didn't stop the 130-year-old paper from printing its latest edition two days later. (City of New Rockford map)

Maddow said, "Our whole country needs local newspapers. Everything happens somewhere specific. This is just the story of the survival of this one spunky local paper, but it's also, I think, the universe reminding us that we all ought to support our own spunky local papers . . . Even if you hate your local paper, subscribe anyway. If you really hate them you could offer to write for them . . . Support your local paper, subscribe, pay to get behind the paywall at the website. You will be very sorry to see them go." (YouTube video)