
{"id":4045,"date":"2008-11-25T12:14:50","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T20:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=4045"},"modified":"2008-11-25T12:14:50","modified_gmt":"2008-11-25T20:14:50","slug":"heady-days-for-newspapers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2008\/11\/25\/heady-days-for-newspapers\/","title":{"rendered":"Heady days for newspapers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Robert Dickson<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The days following Barack Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s momentous election were exciting ones for our state\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nWhile the Internet has an immediacy that a newspaper can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s big day isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, ironically, the one that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll use to remember it by. No, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d guess, but still a curious choice.<\/p>\n<p>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. <\/p>\n<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s my good friend Ken MacDonald who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in charge, and who creates the front page.<\/p>\n<p>The headline in Wednesday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s edition stretched all the way across the page and declared, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Praise Jesus, I can finally die now.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d This was heard above the din at a local community center as the West Coast polls closed and Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s victory was assured.<\/p>\n<p>You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have had to grow up in Raeford in the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc50s and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc60s, as Ken and I did, to truly understand what this headline means to that community.<\/p>\n<p>I can still show you a pair of bathrooms in an old unused warehouse with \u00e2\u20ac\u0153White\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Colored\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t remember any signs dictating this behavior, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what we did.<\/p>\n<p>And the local newspaper, run by my father, identified people in news stories by their race: white, black or Indian.<\/p>\n<p>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.<br \/>\nUnfortunately 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll all just happily crank up our computers and read their stuff on the web.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re right, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m 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.<\/p>\n<p><em>Robert Dickson is the publisher of The Carrboro Citizen.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Dickson The days following Barack Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s momentous election were exciting ones for our state\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4045"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4046,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045\/revisions\/4046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}