News From Across The Country

Get ready to take a trip around the country by leafing through the front pages of daily newspapers at Washington’s Newseum. The physical location is at DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue and 6th Street between the Capitol and White House, but it can be found from your easy chair at www.newseum.org.

It’s here that you can read the front pages of 575 daily newspapers from around the US, ranging from the major dailies to be small heartland newspapers that are the backbone of journalism in this country.

Some 30 years ago a TBS executive told editors at a Georgia Press Association meeting that their industry was dying and would be replaced by cable TV. Sure, and film killed vaudeville theater; T.V killed radio, the internet killed print media. Not yet, each of these have revamped and remade themselves to survive. That’s what newspapers are doing now.

A long standing debate in the newspaper community has been, will the merger and consolidation of papers with large corporations owned multiple titles across the country cause a USA Today type McNewspaper that shows a sameness of content despite varying local issue.

A look at the front pages shows that not to be the problem. There’s a story about logging in a California newspaper, a report on the state fair in Iowa and Miss Cobb County in the Marietta Daily Journal. President Obama made the front page on only a handful of papers – the Washington Post, but not the NY Times. The plane/helicopter crash was front page news on almost every paper but ranged I importance from the only story in NY and NJ editions to a “See page 3” reference on most others.

There are some themes that are seen on today’s front pages that reflect stories seen elsewhere: proposed legislation against texting while driving (Park City, KY); a tax free shopping weekend (Fayetteville, SC); and furloughing state workers (Springfield, IL).

We may bemoan the plight of the future of dead-tree journalism, but there is hope.

Sure there are days when a national news story will appear on almost every front page, but it’s great to know that there is a diversity of coverage reflecting local communities in hundreds of communities across this nation.