The Best of the Best: Small Town Newspapers

As they are gradually swallowed up by heartless corporations like Landmark Media Enterprises, and then sold, our small town newspapers deserve our attention and our appreciation. Oh yes, there’s always The New York Times and those other monoliths but they will never cover the stories we need to read.

This past week brought about the demise of the Los Alamos Monitor here in New Mexico, done away with by its owner Landmark, with the usual excuses about declining advertising. As the obit in the Las Vegas Optic put it, “It struggled with fickle advertisers being wooed by an electronic ‘newspaper’ full of Chamber of Commerce events… and grins and gripes when someone is being congratulated for doing something banal.” It is astonishing that in a town like Los Alamos with some of the highest incomes in the country and the most advanced academic degrees per head, the newspaper can be allowed to disappear.

Landmark is also trying to unload the Las Vegas Optic, a newspaper I love to read. With its largely elderly readership, the obits are given prominent display, as in the September 2 edition with two and a half columns on page 3 devoted to Viola Romero Berg. And she earned them! Born in Mora, N.M in 1921, she was adopted by an aunt and uncle at age two, married a man twenty years her senior, leaving high school in her senior year to do so, and followed him to various posts where he worked as a machinist for the Union Pacific Railroad. After WW2, she helped him build his business in Mora: Berg’s Body and Repair Shop, and raised a trove of children. After his death, she moved to California to join a daughter and helped her with Japanese students touring the U.S. During this time, she was taken hostage by a woman who was stealing the daughter’s car, in which Mrs. Berg was sitting. The carjacker had to push Mrs. Berg out after five blocks because she was beating her about the head with her purse.

But of course the obits are only a part of this small but powerful newspaper. It’s one of the few places one can still read the “Dear Abby” column with its well-worn advice, as well as “Hints from Heloise” (“no more weevils”). It also occasionally runs hard-hitting editorials called “Another Perspective” from other small regional outlets—the Silver City Daily Press, The Communicator, the Quay County Sun: “Racist Thinking and our ‘second brain’”; “Lack of Consideration Affects us all,” “Hope Republicans Rethink Strategy,” “Community Should Mourn a Newspaper’s End.” And many, many classifieds and the old-time comics: Baby Blues, Blondie, Hi and Lois.

And, as a powerful example of the changes—the good ones!—from which our country, even now, is benefiting, a big photo of five strong young women runners, finishing in the top ten of their A-2A race.

Bravo, Las Vegas Optic! Long may you reign and frustrate the greed of your corporate owner!

In New Mexico Las Vegas Optic