The Baboon Congress

News of the World

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Today’s guest post comes from Renee Boomgaarden.

Rupert Murdoch’s recent spot of bother made me think about a newpaper I read for the first time on my trip to the Pine Ridge Reservation – The Lakota Country Times. I found it to be a welcome change from our local paper and the online news services I usually read. Our local paper is published six days a week and contains day-old news and lots of typos and bad grammar. The articles are dull. We occasionally buy a Sunday New York Times in Bismarck, a real treat for our daughter who loves to read to wedding write ups.

I grew up with a weekly paper, The Rock County Star Herald, a paper mentioned quite often, along with its publisher Al McIntosh, in Ken Burns’ documentary “The War”. Al still published the paper and wrote a weekly column when I was a kid. He lived at the end of our street in a grey brick house. Wednesday was always an exciting day, since that was when the paper came out and we could see what had happened in town over the past week. It was a finely written paper and, well, personal in its tone.

The Lakota Country Times is also a weekly paper and seems to be a true community publication that prints news, goings on, and cultural information important for its readers. It describes itself as “The official legal newspaper for the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservation”. Its motto is “Truth, Integrity, and Lakota Spirit”.

My initial impression of the paper was that it was colorful and thick. All the pictures were in color, and there were lots of them. It had many op/ed pieces, health and public service announcements, government notices, regular and guest columnists who were all local people, ads for Indian businesses, book reviews, and pages of letters to the editor.

Some were from tribal members who were incarcerated in the SD State Penitentiary asking for prayers. Some were from Europeans who had visited the reservation in the past and were asking for the addresses of long lost friends. Others were from tribal members living in other parts of the US. One of these was from California alerting the tribe to the public sale of personal possession and artifacts of Chief Red Cloud, a very important figure for the tribe. The letter outlined how the objects had been stolen by army and government officials in the late 1800’s. I was amazed at the details that had been handed down to the letter writer from ancestors about the people who had been involved in the removal of those objects from the reservation and how the artifacts had ended up in California.

The paper dripped with wry and sarcastic humor and had a whole page of Indian cartoons I had never seen before. Any positive happening was reported with photos and extensive copy, such as the graduation of three people from an alternative high school. Obituaries were plentiful and published at no cost in a section called “The Holy Road”. There were far too many death notices for young people, a sad fact of life on the Rez. I doubt that the reporters were so disrespectful and insensitive as to hack into the phone messages of the deceased.

I think Mr. Murdock has lost touch with his readers and what is important to them. Perhaps he needs a refresher course at Pine Ridge and Rosebud to figure out what a good paper can do for a community. The Lakota Country Times has a website that gives a nice sense of what the printed edition is like. Check it out.

What newspapers have you liked and disliked over the years?

69 thoughts on “News of the World”

  1. The Sebeka Review, the paper of my parents hometown. My sister and I were born there but do not remember the place, and were only back a couple of times. So every Thursday my sister would read the social news, mostly who visited whom and why, from all the little communities around it, such as Blowers, pronounced “Blouers” but we always said Blooowers”. Over time we knew quite a lot about people we had never met.
    It was much more interesting to read trivialities about people you don’t know than people you do. And then discuss them as if we did. I guess it was a pretend game in the end, now that I think about it.

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  2. My family subscribed to the Fergus Falls Daily Journal. So I have fond recollections of that paper.

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    I love to read most small town newspapers for all the reasons Renee already outlined. My hometown newspaper is the LeMars Daily Sentinel which is still my favorite small paper. And my favorite column within that has remained the same from childhood to now during my rare visits. Each Wednesday the “Trouble Column is published. It is a list of fines, incarcerations, and legal problems that no one talks about. Of particular note is anyone picked up for shoplifting.

    One never knows who might appear in this column!

    Meanwhile, I still love the Sunday paper in any location — the crossword is my leisurely pleasure that I drag out through the week. And “The New York Times” has the best collection of columnists.

    I have high hopes that Murdoch’s troubles will extend to Fox News over time. He richly deserves all that comes to him. I’m such an optimist!

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  4. i have fond memories of the Duluth News Tribune 25 years ago….
    WAIT! it’s still published daily! but it’s a faint shadow of its former self.
    grew up with the Arlington Enterprise weekly, which we always called the “surprise” because it wasn’t. but i admire the little weeklies from the small towns. fun to get a taste of the town.
    thanks, Renee – interesting and fun topic. i’ll check out the website. i wonder if the Fond du Lac band has a newspaper? will check it out.

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  5. the crabapple cove paper from mash was a great version of what you are talking about here i always enjoyed hawkeyes reading of the mundane and ordinary which had true meaning, in a world where if there is a disturbance on the streets of egypt , syria or afganastan it is referesing hear about the happenings at the 4th of july gathering in the local park. the local eden prairie does print pictures of y kids sports teams and has letter to the editor on the different political issues i care about but ts pretty vanilla. i do like the daily paper in its physical version. i tried getting it on email for a while and that does not do it for me. i like the newsprint in my fingers. i get a kick out of my inlaws who live near ohare in chicago and suscribe to the local rag insead of the tribune or the sun times because they care about the write ups of the local interest stories and not so much about the national and world stuff listed in the big papers. they can get that on the tv. i am concerned about the life of the newspapers because o matter how hard i try i can not get my kids to care at all about picking up a newspaper. when i was a kid i grabbed it everyday for news on concerts the sports guys i cared about and political views. my kids care about stuff but the notion of having a steady ,reference is different. get it off facebook or the internet with a quick google search. its quicker easier and more compact. the first paragraph is all you need most of the time, i thik rupert may have an easy time in the world f today where news integrity is the secondary issue. ratings points of hannity limbaugh o’reilly and the like trump the news excellence of cbs and other responsible journalists. the mnpost is a great example of news rouges that keep on giving us great stories even though they stopped getting paid for it. i hope we can figure out a way to keep things like mnpost up and running we need them.

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    1. tim – i know plenty of folks in my generation who have already given up on printed news, and not a few who don’t even track news anymore unless it’s really big (one friend didn’t know about the goings on in Egypt until a week or two in)…it borders on shameful, in my opinion – how can you be a citizen of the world and not know what’s going on in it?

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  6. Good morning to all:

    Local newspapers are probably always interesting in some way, even the least of them. I always looked forward to reading our local paper up to a few months ago. That paper published a very offensive letter and we stopped having it delivered. You would think that editors would try to use some judgement about what they publish. Our local editor doesn’t alway use good judgement and some of the stories as well as the letters in the paper include information or an approach that shows a lack of good judgement.

    I thought I would continue to read our local paper online. The online version of the paper is in a form that I don’t find very reader friendly, so now I don’t read the paper online or in the paper form. I am a little less in touch with my local community due to no longer reading the main local paper. I wish we had a better community paper like Lakota Country Times. Thanks for tellling us about Lakota Country Times, Renee..

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  8. I have a couple of ex-students still in the newspaper game. Do not expect newspapers or regular quality ones to to survive much longer.The local weeklies may last the longest.
    Sad. But as a former journalism teacher, I do regret the poor quality of reportage and writing and editing (like I should throw that stone) in journalism today.

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    1. agreed sad but true. columnists are a dying breed, opex writers are at the mercy of the edtors which i guess they always have been but the fear of hurting someones feelings is way too front and center to make good newreportng difficult.without it what have you got? who cares! i miss the days when you could read a guy who had something to say and feel like your views were being ared, today it may just be a realazaton that this is a voie i the wilderness but its less reassuring than ever before and i feel sad about that.
      off to enjoy the sauna today. twins play a double header today. i am scheduled to watch what is left of their bodies take the field tonight.. should be good beer sales for those sweaty beer vendors today.

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      1. There is no editing of letters to the editor at our local paper as far as I can tell, or at least there is not enough screening of the contents of letters. I supose there might be some very bad letters that this paper doesn’t publish, but it seems as thought they might put in just about any letter they get and there are some they shouldn’t have published.

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  9. Any fond memories of “The Front Page”? I liked the play better than the movie, but I liked the movie quite a bit.

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      2. i wonder how many people can make it through oth games. i sell all the season tickets i can on stub hub and go to whatever i have left. i sold the rained out game earlier so i dont have tx to the first one. my daughtere said she’d like to go wit me to the eening game. i congradulated her on being hearty enough to go to a game when it will be 100 degrees . oh yeah i forgot it will be super hot was her response. i still have my tickets for tonight n stub hub for sale but i cant imagine anyone wanting to pay to sweat for an evenig of ball. we will see. if they sell on stub hub i tld my duaghter we can go buy them cheap on the street. wish you could smuggle in lemonade. i hate paying 5 bucks for a water of a coke and 8 for a beer.

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  10. Ron Howard I once heard say that in prepping for his film The Paper he tried to make a deal with the newspaper people that the headline for his obit would NOT be “Opie Bites It.”
    My favorite piece of Ron Howard trivia is children are named for where they were conceived.

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      2. Bingo. It is not necessarily clear that a news story has ended if written in a true inverted pyramid. So that everyone knows, a 30 is put at the end. Now the origin of that 30 us unclear. But anyway, the obit column is thus called 30. I have always liked that bit of inside joking/language.

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  12. The summer I lived in Grand Marais I would savor the weekly Cook County Herald (I think it was the Herald) for days. Loved reading the columns about what was happening in the various communities around the county. The Gunflint Trail column was as often about what sort of critters had gotten into whose garbage or house or garden as who was visiting whom. Justine Kerfoot wrote the Gunflint column, and that raised the writing bar a bit, I think. I contemplated getting it mailed to me in Mpls once I was home, but having just graduated from college, the subscription price was an extravagance I could not afford. Alas.

    What I would like now, though, if they could make it economically feasible (I know it is technologically feasible) is to get a daily newspaper that had some options for customization in the content. I don’t need the sports section, thank you. Ditto the celebrity gossip they insist on putting into the A section. And even though I harbor aspirations of many things, truth-be-told I don’t read most of the stuff about how to decorate my house, so that could get the boot too. News, comics (yeah, I read ’em all, even Mark Trail…can’t help myself), the mess that passes as an op-ed section, crosswords, book and arts reviews, some local (though less of the “this burned down” and “that person committed crime X”), and Miss Manners. That’s all I need.

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  13. Long before I knew of The Onion, I’d been to Arizona and picked up a copy of the Sedona Excentric. Great humorous ‘newspaper’ with fake stories and hysterical ad’s.

    One summer, while I was tour guiding on the S/S Wm. A. Irvin, I did a weekly spoof newspaper for us, “The Saturday Irvning Post” (yeah, I know, but it was the best pun I could come up with). Honestly, I don’t remember much of what I wrote. One thing I remember was one of our female guides (who didn’t have a boyfriend at the time) going on a short vacation to Lake Mantrap. So, I opened that week with the headline, “Brenna goes to Lake Mantrap. Comes back empty-handed.” I think I implied that she was on the ‘catch and release’ system.

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  14. I grew up with the Des Moines Register. Every day a new Frank Miller cartoon front and center and the sports were in their own section called The Peach, because that was the color paper they were printed on-it was so probably long before I was even thought of, so I don’t know why that was. The cartoons were in there too.

    These days, our neighbor tosses her Pioneer Press onto my porch when she is done with it. I mostly find it infuriating, but look at it every now and then.

    The papers I love these days are the copies on microfilm in the Historical Society library (hopefully reopening by the first week in August, when I am thinking I may have time to get there again) from my parents’ home towns-the Belle Plaine Herald and the Young America Eagle (later absorbed by the Norwood Times). I go mining in those for genealogical research, but often side track into the other news from over a century ago-nobody wanted their taxes increase back then either-in fact a LOT of the issues are the same-but the use of language is more elegant.

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    1. I really liked reading the Register when I lived in Knoxville, IA for a year on psychology internship at the VA hospital there.

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    2. They had a great columnist there, too–Donald Kaul. He and another guy started the summer bike ride across Iowa to prove it is not flat! What fun.

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      1. otherwise known as RAGBRAI. The route changes every year, but always goes “coast to coast” as it were. One year, the ride came to the town my parents were living in-I don’t suppose there was an empty pie tin to be found for miles. The small towns usually did pretty well out of providing food for the riders and their support teams-I don’t know if it is still that way or not.

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  16. Our local paper recently reported that the bass in one of the area reservoirs were growing 13 feet long. The writer mant to say 13 pounds. The proofreading in our paper is terrible.

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    2. well, 13 feet long sounds like a true fisherman to me. my Dad used to tell me fish stories and he’s always say (about the one that got away) “it had scales the size of silver dollars!!”
      how many folks reported catching 13 foot basses that season? 🙂

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  18. Great story, Renee. Thanks for the link – it was fun to check out.

    My favorites have been the Duluth News Tribune and the weekly Waterville Lake Region Life. The Lake Region Life is folksy and appealing if you live here. The writing is poor but the stories are uniquely local. They have a typical gossip column (who went over to visit whom on Saturday), and they only changed to color print in the last year. I’ve subscribed to the Faribault Daily News and the Mankato Free Press in the past. The Free Press is good at local coverage and they have a great photojournalist, John Cross. I’ve noticed lots of typos, misspelling and bad grammar though. There are plenty of ongoing ideological battles which are argued in the op-ed columns. Another good paper is the Albert Lea Tribune which comes out twice weekly. I also read the Cook County Herald when I’m up that way.

    I’ve tried to enjoy online versions of some of these newspapers but I don’t enjoy it as much. I still like to have the paper spread on the table in front of me with a nice hot cup of coffee.

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    1. The Albert Lea Tribune is the local paper I refered to that published a letter that was very offensive. It is a daily paper. This paper might look okay or good to those who aren’t directly from the community, but I know that they don’t show much respect for people in the community in some of the stories. They also fill up the front page with very large pictures and stories that are filler and not really about anything except some very minor activity in the community. I don’t like to be so negative, but I think even low budget local papers should try to be sensitive about what they publish in their letter section and in their local news stories.

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  20. I am off to SW Minnesota and I will be off the blog as my parents don’t have a computer. Thanks for your comments and thanks to Dale for helping with my blog. Have a good week.

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    2. I have been comparing the out-of-doors to a non-voluntary bikram yoga studio…the inside at our house is reaching that level as well.

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  22. Evening–

    We share the local Rochester Post Bulletin with our neighbors… they subscribe to it and then give it to us. So I’m usually at least a day behind and sometimes three or four days behind.
    For awhile I got the weekly paper from the small town of Plainview but the bad proof-reading drove me away. Now, that was a few years ago and I’m not sure if it’s better these days or not.
    There’s a new weekly called the Olmsted County Journal (Rochester is in Olmsted County) that’s mailed free to homes. It’s OK but really a half dozen news stories, a couple of obits, an editorial and 10 pages of ads. It’s young, it may turn into something more yet.
    A friend of mine writes a column called ‘A Farm Chicks Perspective’ for another neighboring town weekly paper. They’re pretty fun but that paper isn’t available online. She joked one day her editor told her she used too many “…” Yep, I can relate to that….

    gotta go- I’m melting.

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  24. I grew up with a daily, the St. Paul Dispatch/Pioneer Press, and a weekly, the Hudson Star-Observer.

    The Hudson paper was housed in a little storefront just off Main Street, and they hosted a lot of schoolkids on field trips. In the 70’s they still used the old letterpress method with moveable type. The paper covered typical small town happenings, police blotter, pictures from the high school play, and so forth. Sometimes there were be a little blurb about someone having a surprise birthday party, listing who the guests were. (I was friends with one of the daughters of the Star-Observer’s publisher, which raised the likelihood that my name would appear in the paper in relation to some event of questionable news value.)

    I still get the St. Paul paper. It’s been shrinking in recent years, but it’s still nice to get an expanded version of a story you heard a snippet of yesterday evening on the radio or TV. I like Bulletin Board. They used to have James Lileks, too – I always liked his columns.

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