Your little paper.

Originally published in Countryside Post, Issue 1.5.

Lots of people have said they love “your little paper,” and I haven’t been quick enough to remind them it’s their little paper, so I apologize. Response has been very positive. One wasn’t; some fellow wasn’t getting his Foothill Trader and called the Post, of all things, to complain. He said he liked the Trader better, which I’m sure the Trader would be just thrilled about if only he had called them. Guess the Post doesn’t have enough ads. We’re working on it.

Some discussions have dealt with my editorial philosophy; seems people have noticed the Post isn’t like other papers, and not just ’cause it’s small, comes in the mail and doesn’t carry canned news. A lot of that has to do with my religious convictions about what’s right to print and what isn’t. I didn’t get a B.A. in theology for the heck of it, you see. (Okay, I did. But if you seriously believe something, it ought to change the way you do things. Otherwise you’re a hypocrite.) Some of it has to do with what I did before I went back to college; when I worked for other papers and said to myself, “If I ran a paper, I’d do it this way.” Well, now I do.

My philosophy is complex, but I’ll tell you this much: there are a lot of people who confuse freedom of the press with freedom from responsibility for what they say and who it affects. I don’t. I hope you readers keep me accountable to that. Heavy part over.

…We got a few phone calls regarding how LOP wound up in “Auburn” and apparently it has to do with how, long ago, Grass Valley’s post office wasn’t up to the challenge of covering the south county. So Auburn’s branch took up the slack and held onto it ever since, regardless of the inconvenience of having an address that appears to be in another county. Many thanks to the Post’s readers for clearing that up. Y’know, if LOP can get its own post office, the address would become “Lake of the Pines, 95602” (or whatever they change the zip code to), not Auburn.

…Ever since the Post changed its main phone number, we’ve been getting calls that consist of beeping. Anybody know how to get rid of automated phone calls? Yelling into the phone doesn’t work. Send your solution, and everything else, to the Post.

—Kent Leslie, managing editor

Update, 9/4/2009: People frequently referred to the other papers in the area—the Grass Valley Union and the Auburn Journal—as “your competition.” My usual response was that they were not competition; we had no competition. The Union covered the cities of Grass Valley and Nevada City, and seldom had any articles about the people and events in southern Nevada County. The Journal covered Auburn and Placer County, and largely didn’t care at all about Nevada County. All of them, of course, tried to get advertising from the area; they’d take it where they could get it, and so would we. But in return for the ads, they didn’t cover south Nevada County news, and that was the only competition I cared about.

The only thing remotely resembling competition was the Foothill Trader, a shopper published by the Journal. Its only purpose was to sell ads. Some shoppers contain articles, but only to fill the blank spaces between ads. Bargain hunters love them. Some of the bargain-hunters in our area seriously looked forward to the Trader every week so they could dig through the classified ads. (This was back before the internet killed the classified ad business, of course.) The Post’s classified ad section, in comparison, was puny and inconsequential. They sucked at news; we sucked at classified ads. We fought for advertising. Otherwise it wasn’t really competition.

But it would be if the Post became a shopper, so I fought hard to keep it unique. “We’re a newspaper,” I would regularly remind people… and sometimes Jill. “We print news and events. The ads fund the news. We don’t take our advertisers for granted; we appreciate that they fund the news, and we provide a medium where their ad won’t get lost in an avalanche of other ads. But bottom line, we’re a newspaper.” Such was my spiel.

To clearly demarcate the difference between the Trader, the Post, and other area newspapers, I kept our focus pretty simple: The main focus, and the only thing we’d put on the front page, would be news. Local news—no Associated Press wire stories, nothing about what went on in Sacramento, not even articles about Truckee (though some Nevada City, Grass Valley, and Auburn events were okay). Really, really local. Plus, the public was encouraged to contribute; they could even get front-page bylines. Lots of photos of local stuff; group photos whenever we could get them—my thinking was that if your picture was in the paper, you’d tell your friends and family, and then they’d read the paper.

And, just to make it unique, I made sure that little idiosyncracies of mine were scattered throughout the paper. The tone of the paper—yes, papers have a tone—had to be friendly and positive, not angry, skeptical, and overly focused on the negative news in the area. (That was one lesson I had definitely learned from working in Dixon.)

I admitted that the policies were largely influenced by my theology, and—in part thanks to this column—suddenly the Christians came out of the woodwork. They all assumed, rightly, that a “B.A. in theology” meant I was a Christian. The trouble is that they also assumed I was a conservative… which I then had to address in the next column.