…..seems to have taken away the dampening effect that national, hyped up fake news has on the common person.

Yeah yeah I know they are not profitable business models but the loss of them and their local news and reporting on all fronts has a detrimental cost to those small town.

Grew up in Del Rio Texas and the Del Rio News Herald went out of business some time ago. Just a sad, unfortunate loss.

Has your small home town lost their local newspaper company?

https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/texas-canadian-record-documentary-newspaper-panhandle-for-record-movie/

My hometown recently checking in after a multi-generation run. No longer live there but never appreciated just how amazing that paper was until recently. I still live in a relatively small town but the paper is atrocious and full of errors every single week. I'm very much considering volunteering as a proof reader because it pains me having grown up with one of the best.

I hope the Victoria Advocate dies off here soon. They got to be one of the worst papers around. My parents are 65 and they have subscribed to that rag for the last 12 years with the actual paper service. They finally have gotten a belly full and canceled it.

The Longview News Journal is a liberal rag despite being in a red county. I suspect most other local newspapers are as well.

People that pusue careers in journalism tend to be liberal, are surrounded by other liberals, and went to college with mostly liberal peers and professors. That's skewed most of the industry into radical left wing advocacy instead of fact based reporting. It's tremendously destructive on the national level and has enabled corruption at an unimaginable scale. Local papers mostly only contribute to the problem.

We have always had two newspapers (now both printed and online) in a town of under 9,000. Both are weekly, one has been around nearly 65 years and the other for around 130 years now. But I do not read either one of them. There is also a county wide daily but it is online only.

There are so many immediate sources of news that printed papers of no consequence any more.

Had "journalists" done the hard thing and kept their houses clean this probably wouldn't have happened as quickly or at all

Like many here have already illustrated even the small town papers weren't immune to activist journalism and, in a sense, worse because they were essentially looking down on their readership. When "the truth" switched to "my truth" is when modern journalists killed the industry. And those who werent complicit but unwilling to stand for the real truth are just as culpable.

I don't feel bad for any of them

Our town of 2500 still has a weekly paper. It is almost 100% summary of the various local government meetings (school board, city council, county commissioners, etc.) and highlighting all of our school kids from elementary to high school. I can't imagine not having it.

Username checks out

https://www.sabinecountyreporter.com/news

The Sabine County Reporter still representing.

Just checked. I was a big city fellow when I came to A&M but several of my closest new friends were from Liberty. Happy to say that it seems as if the Liberty Vindicator of the early 1970's still exists in some form.

The Hico paper (a weekly) has been printing since 1895. Still going strong. The owner is a friend of mine and he is top shelf. However, I do worry about the fate of the paper once he retires.

I caught some interesting news in the Belton Journal print this evening at the corner store. It is still printed at least twice a week and has a good online presence. It probably has two, maybe three full time employees.

Was hoping this was about the death of The Batt and that Texas Tribune rag...

FCBlitz said:

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…..seems to have taken away the dampening effect that national, hyped up fake news has on the common person.

Yeah yeah I know they are not profitable business models but the loss of them and their local news and reporting on all fronts has a detrimental cost to those small town.

Grew up in Del Rio Texas and the Del Rio News Herald went out of business some time ago. Just a sad, unfortunate loss.

Has your small home town lost their local newspaper company?

---

It is not just small towns but large cities as well. At one time, San Antonio had two major newspapers, The SA Light, established in 1881 and the SA Express and News. The Light went under in 1993, leaving SA with one newspaper that is not worth to line a bird cage with.

Fayette County Record.

I still get the Muenster paper and haven't lived there in 25 years

Small town papers still get most of their copy from the AP or Reuters, so the small ponds are just as polluted as the large lakes.

The same type people who became journalists for big news outlets were journalists for local papers. Basically democrat voters who are really socialists and communists and don't like anyone making more money than they do.

If local papers had been popular with the citizens they were supposed to serve, they would have survived.

Wearer of the Ring said:

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Just checked. I was a big city fellow when I came to A&M but several of my closest new friends were from Liberty. Happy to say that it seems as if the Liberty Vindicator of the early 1970's still exists in some form.

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It is, in both a print edition and online. Been around 130 years now. The radio station is gone but all the papers are still around.

It's time for all newspapers, from small or large towns, to disappear. The old model of media needs to go away.

Even the Groesbeck Journal is a liberal rag run by a 27 year graduate of the tu journalism program. If it came up for sale I'd buy it just for the real estate.

The best part about small town newspapers was the police bear, the sheriff's column, the marriage and divorce records, and the stork column.

If you hit the trifecta of being in all three columns in the same week, you'd got a free DQ sandwich. (J/k!)

There are several south of Houston: Friendswood Journal, Pearland Journal, Alvin Sun/Advertiser, Galveston Daily News, and Brazos Facts that still exist. The Alvin Advertiser is still thrown weekly, but is pretty worthless. 80% of the non-advertising is op/ed, some of them VERY long. They aren't all lib, though.

I worked for a very good small-town daily newspaper right out of A&M and I honestly couldn't tell you if we were liberal or conservative. That was a long time ago, in a world that is gone.

Mostly we just covered local news and sports, and promoted the community. The editorial page was mostly wire copy with a rare local opinion -- typically focused on economic development.

No doubt most of my colleagues were liberal -- it's one reason I didn't last long in the profession. But the news coverage was agnostic. The editors were from central casting -- old, experienced, grumpy men who didn't put up with any crap from the kids and taught you how to be fair and meet a deadline.

Shame it all had to end.

Personally, I miss the town crier.

Sarge 91 said:

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Small town papers still get most of their copy from the AP or Reuters, so the small ponds are just as polluted as the large lakes.

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Local news is not national news. Local sports , school happening, local politics and yes obituaries are all important to small towns. It helps to define their identity.

If I want national news I will read WSJ or the Guardian.

Looks like my hometown paper is still a thing (Lake Jackson). Since I don't live there any more, I can't say what leanings they may have. When I did live there, I wasn't attuned to political stuff.

https://thefacts.com/your_town/brazosport/

Rockdale has a local newspaper.

APHIS AG said:

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FCBlitz said:

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…..seems to have taken away the dampening effect that national, hyped up fake news has on the common person.

Yeah yeah I know they are not profitable business models but the loss of them and their local news and reporting on all fronts has a detrimental cost to those small town.

Grew up in Del Rio Texas and the Del Rio News Herald went out of business some time ago. Just a sad, unfortunate loss.

Has your small home town lost their local newspaper company?

---

It is not just small towns but large cities as well. At one time, San Antonio had two major newspapers, The SA Light, established in 1881 and the SA Express and News. The Light went under in 1993, leaving SA with one newspaper that is not worth to line a bird cage with.

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The decline in newspaper readership has been happening since at least the 1960s and '70s, which would have been when television news started to really gain traction. I worked in newspapers for 17 years, and even when I started, the rot had already set in. Free online news pretty much was the final nail.

The good news for small-town papers is that there isn't much local competition in TV or radio, and if they are run correctly can still be a viable product.

I miss small town papers, like the Ranger Times. Otherwise I would never have known that Vonceil Holcomb was a contestant on The Price is Right.

Fredericksburg has a hometown newspaper published weekly called the Fredericksburg Standard. It recently won an award as the best small town newspaper in the state and it does a good job of reporting local news and local government.

BUT, this rag is published by a very liberal T-sip journalist. He puts notices of Democrat party meetings in a prominent place within first couple of pages, while burying Republican party information in the last few pages. Letters to the editor are a joke with ultra liberal/woke viewpoints published regularly, and I mean garbage letters from deranged people.

His opinion page will raise one's blood pressure nearly every time and if he can find something from the Dallas Morning News berating Republicans or Texas A&M he slaps that on there. The latest being the DMN editorial about Texas A&M and the cock-up with that DEI specialist from TU that was going to run our new journalism department. He has high praise for all Democrat solutions and scorn for any Republican.

Gillespie County is 85% Republican and he delights in offending us knowing he has the local market cornered. His kids are being sent to TU for a "good education" unlike that afforded students at the largest college in Texas. This tidbit from a soppy editorial last year about his oldest growing up and leaving home.

He truly epitomizes all that is wrong with journalists and damn, we are stuck with him. Jerk.

Local news is often a thankless job.

all of the media outlets in my hometown regurgitate AP and Texas Tribune. If they had actual local news, I might subscribe.

Small town newspapers aren't usually reporting on national political happenings, they don't tend to have a political slant one way or the other.

FCBlitz said:

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Sarge 91 said:

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Small town papers still get most of their copy from the AP or Reuters, so the small ponds are just as polluted as the large lakes.

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Local news is not national news. Local sports , school happening, local politics and yes obituaries are all important to small towns. It helps to define their identity.

If I want national news I will read WSJ or the Guardian.

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I agree and it's a bad thing these papers haven't figured it out. The Eagle went to the paper being mailed 3 days a week with an on line edition. I bet the mail piece gets axed soon and it will be straight on line.

I like local news but I hate the liberals giving me their slant every time I read the paper (the Eagle uses Tribune pieces to fill space) or turn on the TV to climate change indexes. It's stupid.