Robert Dickson
The days following Barack Obama’s momentous election were exciting ones for our state’s newspapers. Newsstand sales were brisk and several of our large corporate dailies found themselves having to print more copies to fill the demand for commemorative issues.
While the Internet has an immediacy that a newspaper can’t match, I doubt many of us captured screen shots of our favorite news site to save for posterity. The medium that was so vital to Obama’s big day isn’t, ironically, the one that we’ll use to remember it by. No, it’s those dusty, yellowing old newspapers that will be pulled out in the decades to come when we want to prove to our grandchildren that, yes, we were there.
It’s also interesting, and sort of sad, that one of our local newspapers decided to ignore the election completely. Their front page on Wednesday, Nov. 5 had not a word on this great event about which so many in this community cared so deeply. This was a deadline issue, I’d guess, but still a curious choice.
Other community newspapers in North Carolina did a much better job of reflecting the huge interest in this election. The North Carolina Press Association has compiled a gallery of post-election front pages. These can be seen on the web at www.ncpress.com/electionpages/index.html.
I’m particularly proud of the front page of The News-Journal in Raeford. My sister, Anne, and I are third-generation family owners of this newspaper, now in its 104th year, but it’s my good friend Ken MacDonald who’s in charge, and who creates the front page.
The headline in Wednesday’s edition stretched all the way across the page and declared, “Praise Jesus, I can finally die now.†This was heard above the din at a local community center as the West Coast polls closed and Obama’s victory was assured.
You’d have had to grow up in Raeford in the ‘50s and ‘60s, as Ken and I did, to truly understand what this headline means to that community.
I can still show you a pair of bathrooms in an old unused warehouse with “White†and “Colored†stenciled on the doors. When I was a child, black people sat upstairs in the balcony of the theater while whites sat below. I don’t remember any signs dictating this behavior, but it’s what we did.
And the local newspaper, run by my father, identified people in news stories by their race: white, black or Indian.
Raeford and Hoke County, along with the rest of this country, have changed a great deal since those days. African-Americans now serve as police chief of Raeford and sheriff of Hoke County and hold a majority on the county commission. Increasingly, votes are cast not on the basis of skin color but on the qualifications of the candidate. Community newspapers have played a vital role in this change.
Unfortunately for us newspaper junkies, the large corporate newspapers that now predominantly serve our area seem to be giving up on the idea of a printed newspaper, expecting that we’ll all just happily crank up our computers and read their stuff on the web.
Maybe they’re right, but I’m betting that a Ken MacDonald or a Kirk Ross, with their local knowledge and daily involvement in our communities, will continue to make our newspapers relevant, exciting and just plain fun to read.
Robert Dickson is the publisher of The Carrboro Citizen.
It’s great to see all the Dickson bylines in the paper. Congratulations on the expansion of the “Citizen”. It is hard to believe that a local paper did not have a large front page article on Obama’s election. I happened to have been in Uganda during the election. Every paper I saw had a full page picture of him. The Africans were celebrating his success and congratulating Americans for being a part of it. Although the official language of Uganda is English, most of the radio stations used the native languages. These exciting, though unintelligible broadcasts would be punctuated every few seconds by “Obama”. It was an especially wonderful day to be an American in a foreign country. It was great seeing Vicky yesterday. I read her review of “Jesus Swept” and enjoyed it. Maybe you should publish Vicky’s Picks for books. I hope to see you all soon. Ron Huff