Towns need newspapers to record their history
In July 1884, a Connellsville newspaper reporter strolled over to one of the train stations in town to watch as some recent immigrants began the long journey back to their villages and farms in the Old World.
Later, the reporter spoke with J.S. McCaleb, a bank cashier and maybe the one person in Connellsville who knew exactly what was going on.
McCaleb had recently been busy making travel arrangements for the Europeans who had immigrated to the region four or five years earlier to work in the coal mines and coke ovens of the Connellsville Coke Region.
Then, they had been “infatuated,” McCaleb said, by wages that topped $2 a day. But now the bloom was off: work hours had dwindled, wages were down and the immigrants were headed for the door.
The Europeans, most of them anyway, were men, “big, burly” guys who drank hard, worked hard, and were wise in the ways of the world. Most were “extremely economical,” hoping to save as much money as they could to bankroll a piece of land back in their home country. The men were not content to wait patiently as the opportunity for work disappeared.
Now, it’s likely we would have never known about this exodus of immigrant laborers from the region in the summer of 1884, what they were like, or about McCaleb if it were not for this particular newspaper account.
The famous adage that newspapers are the first draft of history is more than true. Without these precious anecdotes, preserved for all time on microfilm and lately electronically, you might even say a town, a locality, a region has no history. No newspapers, no history.
Thus, the recent announcement by Trib Total Media that it was looking to unload the Connellsville Courier along with more than a half dozen daily and weekly newspapers it owns raises an alarming possibility: very soon now, towns like Connellsville, Mount Pleasant, Monessen and McKeesport could find themselves not just without local news — the who, what, where, and when of daily life — but in the space of a very few years they will suffer a certain form of amnesia: they will have no past, except for what is already preserved.
Their collective memory will cease the day their newspapers fold.
Nor is this a problem just for communities with papers published by the Tribune-Review. It’s happening all over the country. Nearly a dozen metropolitan dailies, squeezed by the Worldwide Web and a decline in the number of young subscribers, have closed since 2007, according to (what else) an Internet site, Newspaper Death Watch.
And those are just the big city papers.
Some see a ray of hope for newspapers in the fact that nationwide revenue from circulation currently exceeds revenue from advertising for the first time in a long time. To these folks, things got out of kilter in the ’60s and ’70s, when ad revenue fueled newspaper profitability.
Well, maybe it’s good roles have been reversed. But fewer ads mean fewer pages and less room for the kind of reporting displayed by the Connellsville paper in 1884.
Local journalism is often portrayed as a high calling, though those doing the portraying are mostly movie directors, journalism professors and cockeyed optimists.
My experience was that few things are as dreary as covering yet another fire, car accident, shooting, murder or break-in. In my book, one school board or township meeting is one too many. Another local festival story? No, thank you — 10 or 20 or 30 years in a row is plenty. Local reporting frequently falls into a trap of ritualization.
But, hey, that’s me.
Why is saving hometown newspapers important? Political coverage, for one thing. Keeping alive the interaction of voters and public officials, essential for the health of a functioning democracy, is uniquely suited to local newspapering.
Local government coverage is obviously critical. Opinion — as in editorials — is another. One of the problems with ownership by the Tribune-Review of all those newspapers is the uniformity of editorial comment in all those papers. It’s too much, and not necessarily because the Tribune-Review is so consistently right-wing. The problem is that so many readers are bombarded with the same message day after day after day without once glimpsing the other side — or the multiple sides — of the argument at hand.
It’s impossible for a reporter, working on deadline, to consciously write for future generations, for the history books. It’s probably best not even to try (although a nod and a wink to the future is not such a bad thing). I can’t imagine the reporter who visited the Connellsville train station in 1884 having 21st-century readers in mind.
It was enough for the reporter to have told the truth, or as near the truth as he possibly could. Still in all, it would have been nice if, with McCaleb at his side to translate, he had approached one of the Europeans leaving on the train. What they might have said would have been fascinating and instructive not just for his readers in 1884 but for us, his readers in 2015.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.