Newspaper Content, A Day in the Life

As metro papers struggle, smaller suburban papers are suffering far less and in many cases thriving. What do they offer readers?

We monitored two suburban dailies, the Baytown Sun, the largest of the suburban papers around Houston, and the Waukesha Freeman, circulation 15,000, outside Milwaukee .

What we found was a different kind of journalism than readers would expect from either the national papers or the metro dailies.

Here, local news does not compete with national and international on an equal footing. These papers are above all local. And the workings of civic institutions are news even if they are not necessarily controversial.

In the Baytown Sun stories like “Festival to feature plenty of children’s activities” and “Public Hearing on annexation today at Council” are Page 1 news. So is “Select educators to be honored with banquet, cash,” and “ Decker Drive hospital campus to be sold.”

If anything, the smaller Waukesha Freeman front page was more about conflict and wrongdoing, but it was no less hyper-local. The questionable hiring of a fire chief’s son was Page 1 news, for instance: “Family ties prompts hiring policy questions.” So was “ New Berlin man dies after tree limb falls on him.”

It was in these papers that readers would get things such as the local school briefs, a “crime stoppers” column with mug shots of six people for whom the local police had warrants out for burglaries and such, and news that the local school district would be “Testing this summer for (the) gifted student program,” all from this day’s Baytown Sun.

It was in the Waukesha paper that one could read about a class art project, a local town pondering changing its laws on BB guns, or the local “I have a Gripe” column, which on May 11 focused on residents complaining about local road repairs.

Little is too local for these papers. The Baytown Sun would give a staff byline and nine paragraphs to “Garage sale, car wash to benefit church choir.”

Such papers are unlikely to mount an investigation of corruption in the governor’s office, perhaps. Yet the big city daily is equally unlikely to run a staff-written story about a local hospital headlined, “ St. Joseph to host health fair.”