Success in the Sticks

In the judgment of Robert Marshall Myers, the American rural weekly is valueless, lily-livered and moribund. It is run by "printers," who stuff their pages with syndicated hayseed features and eke out a precarious living on job-printing contracts. "The political power of the country weekly," says Myers, "is a grand illusion. More than half of the nation's 9,000 weeklies never print an editorial. Those that do are generally reactionary."

Myers ought to know. A crewcut, ascetic man of 40, he makes his wholesale indictment with impressive credentials. He is a lifelong resident of Lapeer County, Mich., an area so agricultural that five-sixths of its acreage is farmland. He is also publisher of the U.S.'s largest and most prosperous country weekly, the Lapeer County Press.

Although it lies well within the circulation area of three big-city newspapers, the Press has taken over all of Lapeer County as its own preserve. From Flint, which is about 20 miles west, the daily Journal manages to peddle just 2,249 papers in Lapeer County--to the Press's 8,560. Detroit's two dailies, the Free Press and the News, claim fewer than 3,400 Lapeer County subscribers between them. With a total circulation of 12,123. the Press turns such a tidy profit that Myers scarcely has to bother with job printing on the side. This year he offered to split all profits above $25,000 among the papers staff.

Unpaid Poet. The main reason for the Press's success is that it strives, with considerable effect, to be a good newspaper. "I print what the readers want to know." says Publisher Myers, "and, in some instances, what they don't want to know." The Press clamored insistently for five years before county voters gave in and passed a bond issue for a new hospital. When Lapeer city councilors hollered foul at a Press story noting that the street repair program "was. as usual, getting under way just as the weather turns bad," Myers responded blandly: "It's a fact--the weather is turning bad." The county, like much of rural America, is sturdily Republican, but the Press endorses candidates without regard to party.

The Press was just another somnolent country newspaper until 1950, when Bob's father, Harry Myers, turned it over to his two sons (Bob Myers later bought out his brother's interest). To make the paper newsier, the new publisher reduced ad space from 67% to 60%, crammed in nine columns of copy per page instead of the conventional eight, beefed up the page count from 20 to 36 and sometimes to 40. To attract competent newsmen, he matched salaries with his metropolitan competitors. His editorial staff of 28 now embraces everything from a fulltime photographer to an unpaid poet.

"Deadbeats." In the process of rejuvenating the Press, Myers threw out all sacred cows. He not only refuses to participate in community drives but sometimes refuses to run stories about them. County merchants soon discovered that taking a big ad in the paper did not buy them the customary exemption from unfavorable stories. The Press prints all drunk-driving arrests, even when Lapeer merchants are involved. As if to console them for such publicity, Myers recently reported in his own weekly column that many wealthy residents of Metamora, a community eight miles south, were deep in arrears to Lapeer stores. Myers' victims may not have appreciated the headline, METAMORA DEADBEATS, but Lapeer merchants did.

The Press now saturates the county as thoroughly as any spring shower. "Reading it in the County Press," says Lapeer Attorney Robert Taylor, "is like getting it out of the Bible." Says Wellington E. Rowden, Lapeer florist and the town's mayor since 1944: "If Bob Myers doesn't agree with me, it'll be in the paper. But I guess criticism, if it's right, doesn't kill anybody."

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