News Without Newspapers
Sometimes you don’t know what you have until it’s gone
David Cohea
How important is a local newspaper to its community? Sometimes the answer can’t be determined until you don’t have one any more. The following tale comes from the little Florida town I live in, which lost its local newspaper in 2009.
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Recently Mount Dora — a city of 10,000 located twenty miles northeast of Orlando — got embroiled over a streetscape plan in its downtown shopping district to remove aged laurel oaks and replace them with palm trees. The plan had been approved by city council several years ago, but the clamor didn’t begin until the old trees started coming down. The city posts its council meeting minutes on its website, but no one now reports on them.
Since Mount Dora’s founding in the late 1880s, oak trees have been a graceful mainstay of the city’s shopping district and surrounding neighborhoods. It’s not pure Southern charm (only pines were in the area originally, and magnolias and crepe myrtles would be the locally leafy alternatives) but the grand ambiance of oaks adds the greatest clout to the many arts and holiday and music festivals that round out our calendar. People in nearby Orlando love a brief respite from their bland, megaburbal sameness, and flock here in droves.
Save Our Oaks became a political hot potato. A group calling themselves Concerned Citizens of Mount Dora, who had earlier in the year started their own website and Facebook page to attack the city on a zoning issue, took this cause up with a vengeance. Some of their criticism of city government seems legitimate — we should always hold that function up to the highest standards — but then there’s something else, a moody, ill-spirited animus that belies other motives.
This group was also loudly critical of the city’s planned choice to replace the of city manager, the 20-year director of planning and zoning. Then someone sent two anonymous letters to this person that were so hostile and threatening that the city’s police chief turned them over to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for investigation. The candidate resigned from consideration.
The tenor of criticism leveled by this group against city government is sourly resonant of the 2013 elections. Four candidates ran for mayor and city council seats in a nasty joint campaign that featured mailed attack ads — stuff few candidates in the past could afford. Turns out some of the financing came from a developer who’s been trying to get an agricultural tax exemption of for property they’re sitting on while a major extension of the toll road that circles Orlando completes with an exit into Mount Dora.
Change is coming to the city. Large infrastructure projects are under way. Properties are selling quickly. Real estate is going up. The city’s tax rolls will swell. There’s money to made. At the same time, development impacts will affect quality of life. Schools are underfunded. The state’s water management district is struggling to deal with a burdened resource in changing climate conditions. Florida’s state legislature hates Obamacare and refuses the federal government’s offer of Medicaid expansion. Twenty percent of Lake County’s population is uninsured, there are 44 percent fewer doctors in Lake County and the mortality rate is 23 percent higher among the county’s black residents than its white population.
With so many issues pressing into our little city from all around, there’s very little effort being made to understand these changes from a local perspective. We have rather biased citizen journalism on a website and Facebook page that has no archive. Daily papers that border us — the Leesburg Daily Commercial and The Orlando Sentinel — have picked up whiffs of the story and posted occasional pieces.
When the Orlando Sentinel columnist for Lake County wrote about the threatening letter sent to the city manager candidate and suggested that it was sent by one of the “Concerned Citizens of Mount Dora” who populate the Mount Dora News website, she was attacked on their Facebook page as an unscrupulous outsider journalist. And later when the FDLE decided not to investigate the letter any further, the site suggest the journalist owed them an apology, saying the note was no nastier than something you’d see passed in high school. (Mount Dora police chief John O’Grady said, “In my opinion, it rose to the level of criminal.”)
The only other source of news here is a shopper, The Triangle News Leader, which distributes in Mount Dora as well as nearby Eustis and Tavares. And while it originates in the last offices used in the Mount Dora Topic, the editorial focus for the tiny newshole between wall-to-wall ads is “good news.”
The Save Our Oaks campaign is just the next battle over change in a little town where the fight isn’t clear and the sides are too easily manipulated by a fleeting and surface grasp of the facts. Populist rhetoric of dubious origins now infects our town, and with council and mayoral elections coming in the fall, clear-headed, civic-minded opposition has no center.
Not since our local newspaper disappeared from the conversation.
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The newspaper of record in this town from 1916 until it shuttered in 2009 was the weekly Mount Dora Topic. Its story provides compelling proof of how important local newspapers are to their communities — and what communities are vulnerable to when they stale or wither go away.
Mount Dora’s first newspaper was actually the Mount Dora Voice, which started in 1886. The Rev. W.S. Fitch, minister of the local Methodist Church, was editor and publisher. The first edition’s front page carried the Elizabeth Browning poem “A Woman’s Question” and two articles — “Getting Acquainted” and “The Climate of Florida.” One of the main motivations for publishing the paper was attracting winter residents.
The Voice didn’t survive the long hot Florida summer, and Mount Dora was again without a paper until 1916 when Ida Walton started the Mount Dora Topic. By the end of its first hardscrabble summer, the Topic was sold to Edith Edeburn Keller. Edith and her husband ran the paper until 1947; she was the reporter and he worked the linotype machine.
In 1947, Paul H. Reese bought the Topic. His wife Mabel Norris Reese was editor. Relocated from Ohio, many in town considered her an uppity northern liberal. She certainly was feisty, delivering one of the finest examples of community journalism in her many confrontations with notorious Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall.
McCall was piece of work. A sheriff, he ruled Lake County with a racist fist from 1945 to 1972, when failed to get re-elected after being acquitted by an all-white jury for the murder of black inmate.
Back in 1949 when a 17-year old married white woman in Groveland claimed she had been raped by four black men, it was McCall who fanned public sentiment. A posse dispatched by him shot and killed one of the suspects and a mob of 1,000 closed in on the black residential areas of Groveland, demanding the other youths be turned over, burning houses and turning out residents. When the remaining three suspects were captured, the mob demanded a lynching. McCall was supposedly transporting two to the state prison for safe keeping when they were both shot by the side of the road by McCall, who claimed they were attempting to escape. One of the inmates died, but the other, Walter Irwin, survived to face trial.
Initially supportive of McCall as the other Central Florida papers (the Orlando Sentinel ran an op-ed cartoon that drew the fastest conclusion), after the shooting she became skeptical and then increasingly critical of McCall and the area’s rush to judgment on the Topic’s editorial page.
Reading Reese’s editorials on microfilm at the library in Eustis, I didn’t know what was odder, her willingness to take on a fight no one else cared to get into, or that they were wedged it in between voluminous reports, all in her own hand, of the everyday — stories on city council meetings, oak tree plantings, bass fishing, library events, shuffleboard results, Easter services, rosy copy about the city’s fine weather (intended to lure the northern visitor), prep sports, performances the local theater, election politics, engagement announcements, “East Town News” (goings-on in the city’s black neighborhood), car crashes and farm reports. She didn’t quit her day-job obligation to cover her community while at the same time challenging her community to live up to the highest standards.
Her editorial positions came at a cost. McCall went so as far as to poison her dog, paint “KKK” across the windows of her office, place a burning cross in her yard. While she pressing the governor to reduce Irvin’s death penalty conviction commuted to life in prison, dead fish were thrown into her yard and on two separate later occasions, bombs were exploded in her yard.
In 1954, the Florida Supreme Court upheld Irwin’s conviction, and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case. But then-NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who had unsuccessfully defended Irvin, then put pressure on LeRoy Collins, the new Florida governor, with a committee of religious leaders and eventually Collins, who reviewed all the evidence that had been ignored in previous trials, relented and reduced Irwin’s sentence to life in prison.
(If you aren’t familiar with it, Gilbert King’s Devil In the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (2012) covers the story in great detail. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2013.
While this was going on Allan Platt, a fruit-picker, moved to Mount Dora with his wife and five children and enrolled the children in Roseborough Elementary School. Children complained to their parents that they “looked like niggers” — their skin was “too dark,” and “they had those noses.” Allan Platt produced marriage certificate that verified their white ancestry (they were Irish-Indian), but Willis McCall stepped in, took a long look at the Platts and decided they were Negroes and forced the Roseborough principal to bar the children from school.
Fighting on her own home turf, Mabel Norris Reese was fierce and relentless going after McCall. In one column addressed to him she wrote, “If you are a parent,” she wrote, “look at your child and think what it would mean to you if an adult said: ‘I do not like your child’s nose’ and thereby decreed that your child cannot associate with other children.”
After the column ran, Bryant Bowles, the founder of the racist National Association for the Advancement of White People joined McCall in harassing Reese, swearing to “get even” with her for condemning her. The Platt’s landlady was anonymously informed that “her house would burn down” if she didn’t evict “those niggers.” She did.
Reese didn’t give up the fight, though. She printed pictures of the Platt family — getting served Thanksgiving dinner, attending classes at Mount Dora Home and Bible. She ran endless editorials and petitioned the governor.
It was not popular position in this backwater town. Advertisers withdrew and people cancelled their $2.50 a year subscription. In June 1955 someone started a rival local newspaper called the Mount Dora Herald began publishing. Although it only lasted ten months, the Topic lost substantial financial ground to it.
In the end, the school board’s (and McCall’s) position was challenged and court and thrown out. The Platt children could attend a White school in Mount Dora. The children finished school at Mount Dora Home and Bible.
(For a wonderful fictional retelling of the story, see Susan Carol McCarthy’s novel True Fires. Of the book she has said, “(In Reese) I had my hero, a classic theme — power of love versus the love of power — and the tantalizing details that Ms. Reese and many women and young people in the community took a stand against (Sheriff) Willis and the local good old boys, and somehow, against great odds, Ms. Reese, the women, and the Platt children won. It was a great story, and I felt privileged to tell it.”)
None of this approached the deeper racial issues of the day. Reese only had so much room to maneuver in. Attacked relentlessly as a communist, she frequently had to print op-eds against Stalinism and the evils of the East. She wrote broadly about race relations and other unpopular positions like environmental legislation.
Reese picked up numerous state and national journalism awards (back in the 1950’s, there was a separate category in state competitions for woman journalists). She was the first recipient of the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism, an award named for the abolitionist editor who was killed by a mob after his printing press had been repeatedly destroyed by mobs because of his stand against slavery. Reese kept vigilant in her editorials — all the while covering shuffleboard and weddings and prep sports and city council meetings where traffic lights and school bus fees were argued.
“In all issues,” she once wrote, “it is not a matter of ‘who is right’ but ‘what is right.” That standard for journalism in the face of so much that is yet not right is what makes a local newspaper the lifeblood of its community.
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Commercial success for the Mount Dora Topic became possible when Al Liveright bought the paper in 1970 and saw it through a great expansion. The population of Mt. Dora had grown. The paper printed on bigger newsprint and swelled to 16 pages with many full-page ads. They had a managing editor, sports editor, copy editor, two ad reps, a circulation manager, bookkeeper, layout artist and compositor.
There were letters to the editor, snippets from Mt. Dora Topic from 20 to 50 years before, prep sports, photos of citizens giving their view on various topics — even a crossword and an editorial cartoon. In the fall of 1975 the Topic was selected “Best Newspaper” for its circulation (under 4,000) by the Florida Press Association.
In 1982 the Topic was purchased by William Matthews along with The Triangle News Shopper, Tavares Citizen and Eustis News. These were all produced in the same building on Route 19A. Liveright continued on as editor, but the paper was in decline. Editorial content was largely the same for all papers with some local coverage.
When Matthews died in 2009, the family sold all publications to Independent Publications out of Bryn Mawr, PA. The local papers in Mount Dora, Eustis and Tavares were then shut down, leaving only the Triangle News Shopper. In 2013 the Shopper was sold again to Lakeway Publishing Group of Lakeway, TN, in a deal that included the Pasco Shopper, Sumpter Shopper, Clermont News Leaders and Osceola News Gazette.
Cheryl Crisp was publisher when the decision was handed down to shutter the Mount Dora Topic. “Back then it was ‘cut costs, cut costs, cut costs, and none of the newspapers were making any money,” she says. She now works in sales for Waterman Village, a popular retirement community here in town. “I was lucky to find a second career to transition into.”
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Running a small-town newspaper is a tough job. Frequently it’s a mom-and-pop shop, with one as the publisher who sells the ads and a spouse who writes and edits and lays out the issue. Maybe there’s a freelancer who helps with occasional pieces, someone in the community who contributes a column. If the ad revenue is good, maybe the newspaper can afford a sales rep or an extra reporter. Typically low-tech compared to their daily cousins, community newspapers are also under increasing pressure to evolve print-digital platforms for their news and ad delivery on much more limited resources. Full plate, daunting challenge.
It’s estimated there are still about 7,000 community newspapers publishing weekly in the United States. While local newspapers may be faring better than the beleaguered dailies (less competition in their market and a more traditional readership), the financial challenges they face are real and deepening.
When the recession hit its deepest point in 2008, we here at King Features Weekly Service saw a sizable drop in subscriptions. Understandable, but what was surprising was how many newspapers weren’t simply cutting back; they were shutting their doors.
Real numbers are hard to gather on trends in weekly newspapers because only a percentage of them report circulation numbers to agencies like CVC, AAM, VAC or BAP. Jim Bingamen of the Circulation Verification Council (CVC) said that of the 2,307 weeklies tracked in their audit system, 48 have ceased publication since 2010. (He added too that many more have started in weekly and monthly cycles. )
Closures aren’t just for financial reasons. Towns decline, advertisers thin out as chain retailers close in. Long-time staffers retire or die. Newspapers succumb to competition from other papers in the market or from bigger papers vying for their territory, as what seems to have happened to my Mount Dora Topic.
So what then is lost?
Penelope Muse Abernathy in her book Saving Community Journalism (2014) says that newspapers provide three essential things for their communities.
- First, they set the agenda for public policy debate. This is the news that no one really cares to read but editors make sure it’s on their pages — to attract the notice of citizens and suggest a course of action. In his book Losing the News That Feeds Democracy (2009), Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Alex Jones estimated that 85 percent of the journalism that affects major public-policy change has originated with newspaper reporters — at both large and small newspapers.
- Second, community newspapers encourage regional economic growth and commerce by providing a marketplace where readers and advertisers can connect. Beyond that, however, journalists in small-town newspapers play an important role in encouraging long-term economic growth and the prosperity of the entire community.
- And third, they encourage a sense of geographical community. Local community is all about what impacts life at home — school, sports, parenting, events. “A good newspaper is an anchor in a community,” says Ron Heifetz, professor in Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “A newspaper reminds a community every day of its collective identity, the stake we have in one another, and the lessons of history.”
Played back into my little town of Mount Dora, the lack of a local newspaper’s voice is made worse as the daily papers which successfully competed against the Topic now provide less coverage of the town. Both the Orlando and Leesburg dailies are suffering declines. The Orlando Sentinel still prints a Lake County edition seven days a week — as long as the ad dollars are here, newspapers will be printed — but where in the ‘90s the Sentinel’s Lake editorial bureau had more than a dozen reporters, three sports writers, three photographers and three editors, now there’s just Lake County columnist Lauren Ritchie and two reporters who, according to Ritchie, are “still in school.” Lauren does fine reporting, but she has to cast a wide and thinning net. The Leesburg Daily Commerical’s editorial cartoonist has weighed in several times on Save our Oaks — taking alternate positions — but they poke at surface attitudes that are well-known in the town. As both dailies decline, delivery into our area becomes a greater financial burden. Some day they will eliminate delivery, focusing instead on their primary markets, and all we’ll have is poorly trafficked Web coverage.
Context is very hard to come by. Reporting at depth is nowhere to be found in the sources at hand. Some online searches yielded posts from The Orlando Sentinel’s online archive going back to the 1990s, but there’s no such access to the Daily Commercial. When I began research on this post, I turned to old-school repositories of history, looking through bound copies of the Topic from the 1970s until 2009 when the paper folded. (The microfilm reader at the Mount Dora library was on the fritz.)
In a March 1993 issue I read about the Storm of the Century, a vicious spring twister that ripped through Mount Dora, uprooting some 500 trees and splitting another 1,500 — many of them aged laurel oaks that the city’s streetscape plan is now addressing.
In an article in the Topic by Janice Kramer titled “Storm Ravages Mount Dora,” the city’s grief over the loss was clear and resonant:
The great old oak in front of the Donnelly House is down— just a shell encompassing its huge girth. On some streets, almost the old trees are down, or will have to come down, trees that had already outlived their normal life span by one or two decades. No longer will old Mount Dora have those wonderful, shady streets, trees arching overhead.
March 13, 1993, a day we won’t forget for a long time. The cool, shady streets are now filled with brilliant sun. Those venerable oaks, the noble trees almost a century old, that over the years have contributed so much to Mount Dora, are mostly gone — victims of a violent storm of a few hours’ duration in the early hours of March 13 …
Eleven years after Mt. Dora’s 1993 Storm of the Century, Hurricane Charley shifted east of its projected track over Leesburg and slammed into the Orlando area with 100-mph winds. Winter Park lost 8,000 trees in the storm, many of them the aged laurel oaks that used to dominate the city’s urban forest. Since then, another 3,000 trees have had to be removed due to storm-related damage. Winter Park has since developed an urban forest management plan with the goal of restoring a more healthy and diverse urban canopy. The city’s forestry division has a $1 million annual budget for this work, with another $500,000 spent annually by the Electric Utility Department for tree maintenance. When I checked with John Peters of the Mt. Dora Public Works and Utilities, he works with a annual budget of $400 for tree replacement. Clearly, if Mount Dora wants a more robust plan for its urban canopy, the city will have to pass ordinances for maintenance and renewal that far surpasses its current budget allowance.
Last week, about 500 residents churned up by the Mount Dora News website’s Save Our Oaks campaign turned out for a special session of city council to hear their concerns. It’s hard to tell what they were looking for — the city wasn’t going to replace the palm trees they had already put up. Still, the council agreed by unanimous decision to look into ways of adding more replacement shade trees to the streetscape. A workshop on June 15 will explore the issues at more depth.
Ironically, the next day a monster thunderstorm rolled into town with hail and driving winds. An old sycamore on the main street was toppled, knocking out power for most of the city. The city’s welcome sign (lampooned earlier in the Daily Commercial was blown over.)
And so, to and fro goes the way in our newspaper-less town. This summer, candidates will register for the fall elections. Save Our Oaks will surely be rallying call for some of them. The developer just outside of town is still looking for leverage in city government. Many other issues encroach the fiber of our daily existence — taxes, school challenges, the old historic imbalance between white and black opportunity, a heating environment that promises hotter, harder, more extreme weather.
Mount Dora could sure use a Mabel Norris Reese in an Al Liveright newspaper. A digital start-up seems more possible, but as I scrolled through all those old print copies of the Topic on microfilm, I couldn’t help but pine for a newspaper of record, as much a community as the community it served.
Who knows. Maybe I’ll help start one.
David Cohea is general manager of King Features Weekly Service, an editorial service for 700 weekly newspapers.
Thanks to the following who offered help and insight while researching this post: Gregory Phillips, reference librarian at the W.T. Bland Public Library in Mount Dora; James Laux, author of “Mount Dora: A Short History of Mount Dora”; Ann Yager, advertising director / general manager at the Triangle News Leader; Lauren Ritchie, Lake columnist at The Orlando Sentinel; and Susan Carol McCarthy, author of “True Fires” (2004) and “Lay That Trumpet in Our Hands” (2003).
