Being a Modern Day Journalist

Well that may be a stretch! A bunch of us in town got together over four years ago to provide a local newspaper. Our town is a little over 13,000 people and is located 30 miles west of downtown Chicago, as the crow flies. We are in the very conservative, republican county of DuPage. Our community is probably more centrist than most in the county. We have a diverse population of white, black, Hispanic and oriental. Household incomes are very diverse and probably follow the statistical distribution of the nation (my guess, anyway). Education levels span the gamut – we are next door to Fermilab, a national particle physics laboratory run by the University of Chicago for the US Department of Energy. PhD’s and scientists galore; many of whom live in our community. And their support staff. So we have an intelligent population; probably more so than the average community in America. 

Warrenville, Illinois had a string of small town newspapers over the years. Not what most would term professional journalism but a good try and much appreciated. Some papers filled the gap when another faded away. Most of the newer papers lasted only a short time. But ours has survived so far. 

We first were born as the Warrenville Sentinel. It was ill fated due to conflicting opinions with the publisher. That paper died when the volunteers quit after 6 months. Two or three months later most of the volunteers coalesced and founded a new paper, the Village Chronicles. As the name implies it is plural in two senses: first it was hoped that we could be a newspaper for more than one community; second, chronicles is a term that means stories being told about an area or town or people. That’s us. We tell the story of the community. We are currently serving Warrenville, Illinois; we are partially covering Winfield, Illinois starting this week. And we are dropping off hundreds of papers at key locations in West Chicago and cover some of their chronicles as well. By year-end we hope to formerly cover West Chicago.  

We may even be able to provide this coverage to all three towns on a bi-weekly basis year round. If things get really good we might be able to return to weekly distribution. 

There is a big deal here. Standard journalism has been replaced in the main by electronic distribution. Many people, and mostly younger generations, are getting most of their news from the Internet, Facebook, Twitter and other social media. For free. A massive flow of information at their beck and call. And their selection. 

Our newspaper – The Village Chronicles – distributes its printed format by the US Postal Service to every home and business in our selected communities: 7000 for Warrenville, 4200 for Winfield, and 12,500 for West Chicago when we distribute there formally. We don’t have an army of paper boys. We don’t distribute via normal newspaper means. We mail our product directly to the readership. And it is not a free suburban ad rag. It is a newspaper. Free to the reader, but not a rag! 

To write the story of each community we employ the services of volunteer writers, news items, announcements and press releases. We sell ads to pay for printing and mailing the product. Production staff and down right labor are volunteer. Our newspapers come from the people, the readers and the fabric of the community. That makes our content real. Very real.  Authentic really. 

We are not perfect. We struggle to do the right thing and at the right time. Biweekly schedule doesn’t help. Volunteer news gatherers and writers pose additional problems. But the paper is a good and sound product. It is a dream for budding journalists: people who wish to write about life around them, what it means in the cosmic sense, and what it means from a practical sense to real people.  

We provide a website – www.villagechronicles.net – and supply late-breaking news items as well as most of the content of the newspaper without the ads on that site. It keeps us modern. Trouble is traffic does not indicate it has caught on yet. We are working on that. 

With the electronic format available our news content can be uploaded by the internet world and fed to news organizations globally. Whoever wants our material can have it. It is available free for the taking. 

We think this is the future of journalism in the modern age. We also think it is authentic. It is very, very real. 

Our vision is simple: real people writing about their community life for the benefit of those communities; up close and personal. The who, what, when, and where is reported to the best of our ability. The why is left up to the readers. Occasionally we do analysis and white papers on complicated items. But what is important is really up to the readership. 

I think our story is important. I think it is reflective of the economics of journalism. It is also reflective of smaller town newspaper needs. We invented our own, just like the old days. And it is working. Our newspaper has its roots four years ago plus. But the current newspaper is just three years old under its own name and steam.

Its mission and vision is clear. May other communities follow this same path toward social interaction and cultural growth. Journalism is not dead. It is the old born new again.  I hope your town finds its voices.

July 8, 2012