>>>>Do you often read small town American newspapers?
>>>
>>>Not as often as I would like.
>>>
>>>Fernando
>>
>>Most of them are terrible. What do you get out of them?
>
>Most events take place in 'small towns' or small suberbs of large towns.
>What you get from local newspaper reporting of such events is usually more accurate than what you get listing to the major media reporting on the same event. For example: On Jan 16th, an American citizen from Nigeria, Peter Odighizuwa, attending Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Va., became disgruntled with the grades he had been given and returned to campus with a handgun. He shot and killed the Dean, a prof and a student, and shot three others. To read the national accounts of the incident you'd think that Tracy Briges and Mikael Gross physically attacked and subdued an ARMED man. A truely heroic act of bravery, except that is not how it went down. Bridges and Gross both ran to their cars and retrieved legal handguns. When Odighizuwa saw Bridges approaching with a visible handgun he dropped his weapon and raised his hands. The media's widespread omission of the fact that a private citizen with a gun undoubtedly saved many lives is simply too blatent to ignore.

I suppose that medium-sized papers vary a lot in quality. The story you describe (with which I'm not familiar) may be the sort of high-profile thing where they start to pay attention and do a better job.

I used to buy local papers here and there when I drove across country. I was trying to keep informed about world events and also pick up on local color. I was usually disappointed in both ways. These papers are quite small and have little room for national and especially world news. Americans are often accused and often accuse themselves of being ignorant of the outside world. Small town papers are a part of the problem, and have been for a long time. To an extent, it is understandable that papers with a circulation of under 100,000 will not be able to print as much news, or send out a lot of correspondents. What is unforgivable is the small papers' frequent laziness in covering their local news. City and state government news goes largely unreported, and local scandals go uninvestigated. One might assume from reading such papers that there is no local news, except for someone's lost dog.

Gannett and Scripps-Howard own many of these papers, and make the problem worse. Gannett, in particular, uses these papers as cash cows. That's how they were able to start up the USA Today everywhere overnight.