Last week we said goodbye to one of our most enduring and entertaining columnists, Chris Cooper and his beloved column “In the Garden Wet With Rain.” We can safely say beloved because we have had no end of responses from fans in house and out all expressing some sort of regret about Mr. Cooper’s farewell.
Cooper’s departure is all the more troubling because not only has an informative authority fallen silent, in a very real sense, it leaves us with one more crack in the dam that separates The Lincoln County News from everybody else.
We have professional reporters to do the heavy lifting with municipal news and local events, and we take pride in our staff; but that in and of itself is nothing special. Every news organization has that in one form or another. At LCN, it’s our local correspondents that set us apart and we appreciate all that they do for us, and their communities.
On the whole, our local correspondents are the single most talked about, most widely read, hashed and rehashed, popular feature of our newspaper: a fact we are reminded of every time one of them doesn’t make it to print.
Our local correspondents actually report the “micro news,” for lack of a better phrase, that really hits home. We probably won’t send a reporter to cover the local coffee klatch, but the fact that there is such a thing and what went on there is news to someone and it does matter.
When Vicki Nichols proudly reports her daughter is home from school, or Brenda Bonyun chimes in that her house is chock full of relatives home for the holidays, that matters to people in Long Cove and Westport Island; people who know the family; people whose parents grew up with their parents, who grew up with them, whose children went to school with their children.
That’s a connection to the local community that we are proud to feature. That’s a connection you can’t fake, you can’t make and you can’t buy and, when its gone, sadly, oftentimes its something that isn’t easily replaced.
Not to say that we are not always on the lookout for local columnists, but it takes a special someone to do it. You need someone who knows and loves their area and wants to write about the news that is happening on their street, in their town; the stuff that makes up a community, more so than any decision by the planning board or board of selectmen.
In the real world, such special people are becoming harder to come by as the generations that put a value on newspapers and writing and an emphasis on knowing your neighbor moves farther on down the line.
Where local correspondents like Brenda Bonyun, Faith Jones, Marilyn Beane, Jo Cameron, Vicki Nichols, Candy Congdon, Lorraine Fossett, Willa Vinal, Peggy Flagg, Doug Wright, Doc Shilke and Dorothea Vogel et al, were once the lifeblood of newspapers such as ours, they are increasingly anachronistic in a world where corporate money men buy up small papers, slash local staffs, and adopt a cookie cutter look featuring syndicated reports that apply to Anywhere, USA.
In most of today’s news-lite newsrooms, there is simply no room for character.
