"The Local Rag" - Commentary by Tony Seton

The Local Rag

When you live in a place like New York or Washington, you’re likely read The New York Times or the Washington Post and miss out on a whole ‘nother world. While those papers cover their local area to some extent, they are mostly focused on the big, as in global, picture. When you live in a place like Redding, you tend to be delivered less forest and more trees. That’s the nature of life away from the power centers.

This is not to say that you can’t learn something about the nation and the world reading the local paper, not at all, but the emphasis is going to be on what’s happening in the area because locals are interested and no one else is really going to get to it. The radio stations that do news and the television station(s) will cover, but they have limited time and resources, and often draw much of their information from the newspaper.

The challenge for local papers, especially in more remote areas, is to satisfy the interest in area news without presenting an isolated view of the world. Especially in our country where there is a civic obligation to stay informed about state, national and global issues.

Another challenge for a local paper is to remain above the fray; to provide accurate and complete information on issues that are often very personal to the people who live there. For instance, when the scandal broke about unnecessary heart procedures being performed at the Redding Medical Center, some folks here got irate that the newspaper would even cover the story, claiming it was hurting the city.

We have a new editor at the Record Searchlight. She came from another Scripps paper in Albuquerque. She’s been here only a few months, and already is fielding comments like the paper is looking like The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Um, not a lot; the complaint, for that’s what it was, was probably born from an invigoration of the editorials. Once mindlessly lackluster to the point of banality, they now more frequently deal with the important issues, and often in a provocative manner.

My pal Ken questions whether the 30-year-old writer has enough experience to be thinking in such broad terms, cringing at what he thought, and didn’t, at that age. I don’t admit to ever having been that young. Still, I would prefer a little zealous excess to the somnolence of the past. We can’t get stuff done if we’re asleep.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.