Press: 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.