![]() “Their families have been here for so long. In addition to this, managing editor Tina McGrady said staff and reporters are local, they’re part of the fabric of the community they’re reporting about. We’re not going to do a lot of the doom and gloom we try to be uplifting,” Storie said. “We like to look at Montgomery County and find unique angles. He said the editors and reporters there like to find off-beat stories that are relevant to readers. Shawn Storie is the group manager and publisher for the Journal Review. The answer isn’t exactly straightforward and tends to vary depending on who you ask. The question is why and how have both papers persisted in a market smaller than many that have seen the recent death of dailies? The population of Crawfordsville is less than 20,000, while the population of Montgomery County is just short of 40,000. “If we’d known before then what we know now, I’m not sure we would be here.” “In 2008 the economy had a heart attack moment, and newspapers started changing right before our eyes,” Tim Timmons, publisher and one of The Paper’s founding members, said. Lanosga said the fact that a paper established itself so recently and was able to persist through the recession, which saw a spate of newspaper closures around the country and beyond, is nothing short of remarkable. In 2004, however, The Paper emerged as a direct competitor to the longtime, local daily. Between 1929 and the inception of The Paper in 2004, the Journal Review was Crawfordsville’s only daily newspaper. In 1974 the Journal Review was sold to Freedom Newspapers Inc., and in 1999 it was acquired by PTS, a media company located in Alabama, which still owns the Journal Review today. The Journal Review was founded in 1929 when The Crawfordsville Review (founded 1841) and The Journal (founded 1848) merged. “It’s kind of remarkable to have it in a small town like Crawfordsville. Gerry Lanosga, a journalism professor at the Indiana University Media School, said today two newspaper towns are exceedingly rare. More: Crawfordsville movie scene nearly costs actor his life The Journal Review prints Tuesday through Saturday and The Paper prints Monday through Saturday with a Sunday digital edition. Since 2004 Crawfordsville has boasted two daily print newspapers, the Journal Review and The Paper of Montgomery County. Here the narrative of two newspaper towns is playing out in reverse. In Crawfordsville, a town just 30 minutes south of Lafayette, print media and civic life aren’t just surviving, they are thriving. News outlets reporting on the closures fret about what it spells for the future of print media and the fate of democracy.Īnd yet, somehow, print media and democracy persist despite the dire predictions that surface each time a newspaper closes its doors. Citizens worry what the loss of the publication will mean for their town and morning routines. The story always seems to play out the same way after decades a local newspaper is forced to close either from lack of readership, lack of funds, an inability to keep pace with the digital age of news media or, likely, all three. If you do a Google search for the phrase “two newspaper towns” you’ll find a lot of articles mourning the loss of such places.
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