Havre de Grace. -- In 1982, when Irna and I were newspaper publishers here, the publisher of the competing weekly down the road in Aberdeen died, and we bought his paper. It was the right move from a business standpoint, but it brought us face to face with one very uncomfortable editorial fact.
Newspaper readers are resolute in their belief that their newspapers should be local. And while "local" is an imprecise adjective, we soon learned that in Aberdeen, it didn't mean a newspaper with its home office in Havre de Grace.
At the outset we did all we could think of to make the Aberdeen paper, the Harford Democrat, seem as local as ever. We kept the name and the familiar columnists, the office and the telephone number. We thought our coverage of Aberdeen news was already pretty good, and we tried to make it better.
No luck. Aberdeen readers, although they remained generally polite and friendly, were unimpressed by our efforts. Circulation started falling, and eventually we killed the Harford Democrat and concentrated instead on selling our Havre de Grace paper, The Record, in Aberdeen. This perhaps was a more honest approach, and it was moderately successful. Aberdeen circulation seemed to stabilize.
But Aberdeen wasn't satisfied, and it still isn't today. The Record, which we no longer own, still covers Aberdeen news, and seems to do so satisfactorily. But the place of the Harford Democrat, with its distinctive Aberdeen voice, has not been filled. That leaves an aching void.
To older Aberdeen readers, having a local paper meant being able to go over to the Democrat building to see the cigar-chomping editor and publisher, J. Wilmer Cronin -- or if J. Wilmer happened to be out tending to his law practice or local Democratic politics, to see his son Bill. It meant a paper that was of the community as well as about it.
From this perspective, what mattered most about a local newspaper wasn't comprehensive news coverage, although that was important. It wasn't photo quality, or imaginative graphics, or careful proofreading, or some vague concept of journalistic "quality." What mattered most was the paper's tone, the voice in which it spoke to and sometimes for the community.
Good editors understand this, and newspaper consultants frequently prescribe a change in editorial tone. But if the new tone is false, as a tone prescribed by a consultant inevitably will be, readers generally spot it around the time the departed consultant is cashing his check, and react accordingly. One reason newspapers are in such bad repute these days is that so many of them are run by people from out of town, and read like it.
The Sun, like other big papers, has tried to fine-tune its metropolitan voice so that it sounds more local in some of the different communities it reaches. It now assigns an editorial writer full-time to each of the counties nearest to Baltimore, out there in the growing suburban region where most of its readers live.
This makes sense, it seems to me. These writers produce "zoned" editorials about local issues which appear only in the editions of The Sun reaching the appropriate county. They also do signed columns in which they comment on local news. This has certainly brought about more-informed commentary, to everybody's benefit.
But it hasn't resolved the question of tone.
The Sun's editorial page has a distinctive voice when it speaks for Maryland, and to a lesser extent when it speaks for Baltimore. And this, however muted, is the voice of the zoned editions as well. While Sun editorials about Carroll County, or Harford, or wherever, may be better reported than in years past, their tone is still metropolitan rather than local.
The signed columns by the local editorial writers appearing in the zoned editions are less formal and more personal, but their tone is also distinctly metropolitan. This isn't by accident. Few of the writers live in the counties they cover, and their allegiance is necessarily to their newspaper rather than their community.
This isn't wrong, and most of them would be quick to point out that if they lived among the people they wrote about it might compromise their independence. They see themselves, quite accurately, as more like foreign correspondents than country editors.
Andrew Ratner, who directs The Sun's local editorial writers, asked me in for lunch the other day with his staff, and we talked about some of these issues. Ultimately, I suppose, they're really unresolvable. Exurban readers may be quite satisfied with the coverage and commentary their communities receive from The Sun, but that won't make them consider it their local paper.
If it was, they could walk right in and give Mr. Ratner a piece of their mind. On the other hand, they can always call him up and do the same thing. He says he'd be glad to hear from them. His number is 332-6012.
Peter A. Jay is a writer and farmer.