John M. Cropper

An item posted today on a blog for Philadelphia Magazine tells the story of Dan Robrish, a former AP reporter in Philly who is now living a sort-of superhero life in rural Pennsylvania. He quit his beat after 12 years and moved to quaint Elizabethtown, PA, where the corporate-owned daily newspaper had gone belly-up a year earlier. The town, 100 miles west of the capital, was large enough for an independent newspaper to be moderately successful, and Robrish was surprised to learn it was without one. So he started his own. The Elizabethtown Advocate.

From the post:

“I had long been interested in running my own newspaper,” explains Robrish from his storefront office at 9 South Market Street, previously home to the Inspiritu beauty salon (the sign and shampoo sink are still in place). “And then I saw this town of 12,000 with no newspaper.” For some, investing in a “dying” newspaper industry and moving from Rittenhouse to a 2.6-square mile borough was a crazy move, but for Robrish, it was a no-brainer.

“It’s often said that newspapers are dying, but that’s a gross oversimplification,” stresses Robrish. “The papers with the big problems are the metropolitan dailies. You can get that information from so many sources. But here, if you want to read a professionally written news story about what the Board of Township Supervisors did on Thursday, you really don’t have much choice but to pick up the Elizabethtown Advocate, because I was the only journalist at that meeting. I am the only game in town.”

This is something I’ve learned well over the past three years. At Suburban News Publications in Columbus, readership and advertising both grew over the year I was there. At the Wilmington News Journal here, where I just started working, ad revenue has probably declined over several years, but nothing compared to the hardships the major daily newspapers are experiencing. There will always be a market for hyperlocal news, whether online or in print. The doom and gloom predictions about the future of journalism tend to miss the mark: the medium is changing, not the content. And as long as there are interested, engaged and active people in our small communities, good journalism will be successful indefinitely.