Coming Soon: Western Maine Neighborhood News
A New Home for Local Correspondent Columns
The last few decades have been an increasingly difficult time for journalism, and as newsrooms across the country have been forced to shutter or make drastic cuts, one of the areas that has suffered the most is local reporting.
Readers of the Bethel Citizen here in Western Maine have watched the changes that have affected our own treasured weekly: the loss of a local editor, a shrinking staff, and a gradual reduction in the size of the paper. This year has been an especially disheartening one, with the paper switching to an every-other-week print schedule and the closure of the local office.
Last week, freelance contributors to the Western Maine Weekly group of newspapers published by the Maine Trust for Local News received some further disappointing news: In an effort to cut costs, the publishers will be eliminating nearly all freelance content. Sadly, this includes the local news columns that have been a staple of the Citizen ever since the paper first launched, as the Bethel News, in 1895.
The local news columns in the next print edition of the paper, which will be out on December 12, will be the last to appear in the Citizen.
“Facts which can be obtained in no other way”
On the “Greenwood As It Was” Facebook group, local historian and genealogist Chris Dunham drew attention to the long history of the local news columns:
Such columns began in the 1800s as unsolicited correspondence sent to newspaper offices from various towns. They later became a vital and popular part of the papers, with correspondents drafted from the towns, villages, and neighborhoods to submit news each week. When George H. Watkins became owner and editor of the Oxford Democrat on Paris Hill in 1874, he pledged to “secure competent persons as local correspondents from every town in the County.”
Such columns, Chris noted, have always had a few detractors. The American essayist and novelist Charles Dudley Warner, an editor of the Hartford Courant, considered the local news items in country weeklies to be a waste of space, writing:
These “items” have very little interest, except to those who already know the facts; but those concerned like to see them in print, and take the newspaper on that account. This sort of inanity takes the place of reading-matter that might be of benefit, and its effect must be to belittle and contract the mind. But this is not the most serious objection to the publication of these worthless details. It cultivates self-consciousness in the community, and love of notoriety; it develops vanity and self-importance, and elevates the trivial in life above the essential.
Watkins was quick to defend the work of his correspondents, writing in response:
The country paper is a magazine of history, and its records of home life, enterprise and local doings are more worth preserving than most matter which finds its way into more prominent journals. Historians have already begun to consult the files of country papers which have passed through an existence of forty years, for facts which can be obtained in no other way. Trifling incidents, considered unworthy of a place in the daily, may grow or lead into important transactions whose origins the historian can only find by consulting old copies of some despised country weekly.
Recognizing the importance of local news columns to historians, we are launching Western Maine Neighborhood News under the sponsorship of the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society. We know that there is no way to fully replace the feeling of connection that once came from holding a printed paper filled with your neighbor’s voices. But we hope that Western Maine Neighborhood News will continue to build an archive for future historians, while offering today’s readers the convenience of local news delivered directly to their e-mail inboxes.
The last printed local news columns will appear in the Bethel Citizen on December 12. Beginning the week of December 14, several of your favorite local correspondent’s columns will begin appearing weekly on Western Maine Neighborhood News, including the Locke’s Mills news column by Amy Wight Chapman, the Bethel news by Linda Howe, and the Woodstock news by Linda Stowell.
One of the few bright spots in our new media landscape has been the emergence of platforms like Substack that allow readers to directly support the writers whose work they value most. Free subscribers will receive every other local news column. Paid subscribers will receive every column immediately upon publication, and will know that they are helping to uphold a valuable tradition.