Big Fish in Small Ponds

Some of the best journalism in America is produced by newspapers that are too small ever to qualify for a ten best list but that vigorously pursue issues in their communities. These dailies and weeklies are the traditional training ground for big-city journalists. The best of them, moreover, hold on to some dedicated staffers who could work practically anywhere. Editor Albert Scardino of the weekly Georgia Gazette, who won a Pulitzer Prize last week, is a graduate of Columbia and the University of California at Berkeley who worked for the Associated Press, the Baltimore Sun and the Atlanta Constitution. In 1978 he returned to his home town to battle what he saw as the sluggish daily Savannah News and Press. The Gazette broke a succession of stories, not always to the delight of readers: the paper was nearly put out of business by advertising and circulation losses after it violated the wishes of a prominent local family and reported in 1980 that a missing son had in fact been kidnaped. Says Scardino: "I never thought that just because a publication was small, the journalistic standards were different."

Not all noteworthy smaller papers are as feisty and controversial as the Georgia Gazette, but they all seemingly share that philosophy and apply it in all sorts of settings. The Akron Beacon Journal (circ. 163,300), Kansas' Wichita Eagle-Beacon (circ. 120,900), Oregon's Eugene Register-Guard (circ. 65,200) and North Carolina's Fayetteville Times and Observer (combined circ. 66,900) serve sizable communities away from big cities. They are matched in quality by suburban competitors of papers on TIME's ten best list: the Quincy Patriot Ledger (circ. 89,300) south of Boston, the Bergen County Record (circ. 149,200) in northern New Jersey, the Los Angeles Daily News (circ. 132,900) in the San Fernando Valley. Some of these medium-size dailies, such as North Carolina's Raleigh News and Observer (circ. 129,600), Alaska's Anchorage Daily News (circ. 49,200) and Mississippi's Jackson Clarion-Ledger (circ. 69,900) have earned recent Pulitzers.

One of the most enterprising is Florida's Fort Myers News-Press (circ. 64,200), which sends its reporters on what it calls "guerrilla raids" into the news territories of bigger papers--to cover racial unrest in Miami, for example, or terrorism in Central America. News-Press investigative reports led to the cancellation of a $1 million road-and-bridge project that would have benefited only the developer of a proposed housing tract, and to the conviction of a county commissioner for accepting a bribe in the form of services from prostitutes. News-Press editors provide crisp color and clear maps and charts and give play to national and foreign stories of import, whether or not they are of obvious interest to readers.

It is hard for papers with small circulations (less than 40,000) to be enterprising because their resources are spread thinly. Two of the best are family legacies: Virginia's Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star (circ. 30,600) and Alabama's Anniston Star (circ. 30,000). In Fredericksburg, Brothers Charles and Josiah Rowe let their 33 staffers break free of routine meeting coverage often enough to provide noteworthy series on local business development and, in 1982, on corporate lobbying efforts to win state approval of a uranium-mining project. The paper has crusaded so long about freedom of information that the city council now routinely provides it with copies of all the paperwork exchanged among council members. Managing Editor Robert Baker is one major league journalist who heeded the siren song of small-newspaper coverage: after 25 years at the Washington Post, he returned in 1976 to the daily where he got his start. Under its late publisher Harry M. Ayers, Anniston's daily built a national reputation for courage in supporting the 1960s civil rights movement. The moderately liberal editorial policy of his son H. Brandt Ayers still causes some local conservatives to brand the paper the "Red Star," but it has helped attract to the Appalachian foothills a staff that includes promising graduates of such schools as Harvard, Yale and Duke. Reporter R. Robin McDonald last year overcame tight security to detail how a mix-up at a U.S. Army hospital resulted in the deaths of three patients who were given argon gas instead of oxygen.

The same doggedness has for decades been the hallmark of Texas' Orange Leader (circ. 11,300). Says Editor Robert Axelson: "We have a responsibility to staff every entity that has anything to do with the daily lives of people in the county." The eleven reporters have little time to worry about style: they churn out ten to 15 stories a day, on everything from government meetings and drunken-driving arrests to the reasons why a shipyard that once employed 2,000 has been closed for more than a year. Axelson describes the paper's editorial-page voice as "cantankerous." A typical lead: "Our four lame duck county commissioners are likely to step down this year leaving a legacy of bad budget planning that will burden every Orange County resident for years."

The classic image of a weekly's editor is someone who writes much of the copy himself, shifting effortlessly from reporting weddings, births and vacation trips to crusading against corruption. One lively example is Homer Marcum, 36, who in 1975 left an established local paper to launch his own weekly Martin Countian (circ. 4,000) in the eastern Kentucky hamlet of Inez (pop. 500). Marcum has clashed with the coal industry on environmental issues, and with the local Republican political machine, which, he alleges, buys votes in the guise of "assisting" people in the use of ballot machines. Since 1978 the Martin Countian has printed the name of every person who assisted a voter, and as a result, Marcum claims, the practice is diminishing.

The Martin Countian seeks to be judged by its enemies, and the paper has them: it has been sued seven times for libel but has yet to lose a case. Marcum has been punched by people he wrote about and arrested on charges that were quickly dropped. Says he: "Martin County is a good example of what can happen to a place when it receives no media attention. That is the breach I stepped into."