Where A Community and Its Newspaper is One Extended Family
In our continuing series, a closer look at community newspapers around the country and the people who work the local beat.
South Schuylkill News
Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania
Teri Paulin, editor
The weekly South Schuylkill News (SSN) serves the regional area of southern Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania — all its small towns and rural townships. The largest boroughs (2013 data) in the circulation area are Schuylkill Haven (pop. 5,341); Orwigsburg (pop. 3,061); Pine Grove (2,158); Tremont (1,733) and Tower City (1,329). Populations in the townships (roughly 12 total) range generally between 1,000 and 5,000.
SSN distributes on Thursdays with issues mailed to 2,600 subscribers and sold on newsstands. SSN is also mailed to subscribers throughout the country, a few abroad.
The history of The South Schuylkill News follows a vine of many threads typical of newspapers serving multiple communities. It begins back in 1865 with The Tremont News, which published until 1905. A number of papers in area also sprung up, including West Schuylkill Press (1877, later becoming The Pine Grove Press), The Schuylkill County Herald (1878, which later bought The Pine Grove Press and still later merged together), The Call (1891, merged in 1943 with the Orwigsburg News) and The Valley Echo (1908). In 1976, The West Schuylkill Press and the Pine Grove Herald were bought and became the Press-Herald. In 2010 The Call and The Press Herald were merged into The South Schuylkill News, and in 2015 The South Schuylkill News was acquired by Reading Eagle Company.
Paulin began working for South Schuylkill News as a freelance reporter in 2003. She became editor in 2009, replacing LaJeune Steidle, who worked for the newspaper just 8 months short of 50 years, retiring at the age of 86.
The News is also staffed with one full-time reporter (Shea Singley), a part-time reporter (Colleen Hoptak), a part-time “office clerical worker/typist extraordinaire/writer of standard features such as the event calendar, obits, police reports, etc.” (Linda Neyer) and a driver (Eldon Stinnet) who delivers the newspaper to newsstands and post offices. Several freelance writers and photographers are also tapped for the newsgathering effort.
Currently SSN does not yet have a website or offer an online subscription, but it launched a Facebook page back in August that has photo albums, particularly of high school sports in action. According to Paulin, feedback to the page has been positive.
What is your community like?
The coverage area is predominantly rural but is slowly gaining population as people migrate from more heavily populated areas nearby (particularly Berks County where Reading is situated). Several projects to improve infrastructure (highway expansion, bridges) are underway.
Opportunities for employment in Schuylkill County are not as prevalent as they are in the more urban areas to the south (Reading), west (Harrisburg) and east (Allentown), so many commute to work.
Demographically, the population tends to be older. Politically, the area leans conservative.
The communities themselves are close-knit, and the region has a strong German (Pennsylvania Dutch) heritage, especially in the rural areas and to the west. (Our newspaper runs a column each week, “Es Neinuhr Schtick,” in Pennsylvania Dutch and English, written by a retired associate professor of German at Penn State Schuylkill campus, Earl Haag.) Typically, everyone still knows his or her neighbors well and communities bond in times of crisis. People volunteer — many community events are staged solely by volunteer and nonprofit groups. For example, this past weekend, volunteers in Pine Grove donated equipment, manpower and time to put up the town’s lighted pole decorations under direction of the nonprofit Pine Grove Area Christmas Light Committee, started 16 years ago by a resident as a memorial tribute to his wife, whose wish it was to see the little town decked out for the holidays.
The people have a strong interest and connection to their communities’ individual histories, and SSN features a local historical feature, “Turning the Pages of Time,” written by Colleen Hoptak, who has been a reporter for this newspaper and one of its predecessors, The Call, for 31 years. Each week she delves into days gone by, many times interviewing older residents and recording oral history, covering the glory days of the Schuylkill Canal and its anthracite coal transportation, the heyday of the area’s many knitting mills and shoe factories, the railroad, and its prominent citizens. We also run Past Days Remembered, a photo snapshot of historical interest, and Guess Who, asking readers to identify one of their own from an old photo and clues.
Of significant historical note, America’s Oldest Brewery, Yuengling, is five miles north of Schuylkill Haven in Pottsville, Pa.
Also of note is the county’s southern boundary, which runs along the Blue Mountain (part of the Appalachian ridge). Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, the first established sanctuary for raptors, is along this ridge as is the Appalachian Trail. The Pennsylvania State University Schuylkill Campus is just outside of Schuylkill Haven, a borough that also boasts an arts center in a renovated former shoe factory, housing local artists’ studios and hosting community events.
High school football has a devoted following in this area. We have been rebuilding regular newspaper coverage of high school sports through photography, which had all but disappeared. (Know any good sports writers?)
Agriculture here is still strong and hunting is popular, especially as you travel west to Pine Grove and beyond. Love of country and respect for the military is also strong.
How is it changing?
Schuylkill County is developing two pronounced and different regions. While the anthracite coal areas predominate the north, many believe southern Schuylkill County, especially the eastern end, is becoming more similar to the more affluent area of northern Berks County and is primed for expansion.
The region is also becoming known as a bedroom community where people choose to retire — far enough away from the hubbub of city life, yet centrally located within an hour’s drive of several major cities.
What’s a good story about your newspaper’s involvement in the community?
I can look at this question different ways. If you look at involvement in terms of “giving back,” South Schuylkill News has always been a strong supporter of the Schuylkill County Fair and its mission to promote agriculture. Each year we devote resources to publishing 20,000 copies of the official fair guide, for which we write features and design, working closely with the fair association and providing it free of charge as a donation. It is included in the newspaper as a tabloid the week before the fair but also given to the group for distribution in many other locations prior to the fair and at the fair itself. Promoting the county fair through donation of the guide and providing strong coverage of the event is a South Schulkill News tradition.
If you view community involvement as the question — What does our newspaper do for members of the community? — the answer is it provides a unique service to the public not replicated by the daily newspaper. We offer exceptionally detailed coverage of local government itself (this ties directly into the question: What work of your newspaper are you especially proud of?); our newspaper is second to none in keeping residents knowledgeable about what their elected officials are up to. That involvement results in developing a rapport with many a current or former councilman, supervisor or board director, who walks through our door, calls or sends an email just to chat awhile (off the record, of course) about the latest challenges and controversies brewing in their community.
There is a third way to look at community involvement and that’s the practice of involving the community in the newspaper. On Christmas Eve we will feature several pages of “Letters to Santa,” a heartwarming look at the holidays through the optimistic eyes of area third-graders in our four public school districts and one Catholic school. Teachers often use this project as an assignment for students to express their wants and wishes, not only for themselves, but also for others. All handwritten, the letters are collected and then typed, misspellings intact, by Linda Neyer, making that week’s edition a very special read indeed.
What are the big challenges that your newspaper is facing?
Overall, the biggest challenge will be learning to discover ways to keep print media relevant (or find ways to rethink and adapt it) in a changing digital age. And to find ways to keep increasing circulation, which gives advertisers incentive to use the newspaper to get out their message.
Specifically, for our newspaper, the biggest challenge so far has been maintaining continuous local government/school board meeting coverage and assigned stories (and maintaining high quality content while keeping to a deadline) with a finite number of writers, many of whom are not formally trained in journalism and have full-time jobs elsewhere (all of which keeps the juggling editor busy).
What work of your newspaper are you especially proud of?
South Schuylkill News sets itself apart from the area’s daily newspaper in its coverage of municipal and school board meetings — and the way it covers them.
Currently, South Schuylkill News reports on the regular and special public meetings of nine boroughs, four school districts and seven townships. An informed citizenry is an informed electorate.
When I was first hired as a freelance reporter, William Knecht, the newspaper’s then owner, instructed me to compile a detailed report of the meeting, in essence, to become the eyes and ears for citizens who did not attend. Call it as I see it.
This non-investigative format allows us to include detailed exchanges of dialogue and captures for the public the nuts-and-bolts business of local governance much more effectively than by selecting a single issue (e.g., a water rate hike) and reporting only on that issue (although we do that, too). Through this play-by-play (akin to live or reality TV), people get to know their elected officials much better than they would through short snippets or a carefully scripted sound bite for the press. Few details are left out, so the accounts tend to be longer than one might expect to find in a newspaper.
Over and over again, I hear people say they like our coverage because it gives them much more information than they find in the daily (plus they have all week to read the longer versions). And when a reporter occasionally misses a meeting, the absence of that municipality’s story in the newspaper often generates a call to our office from at least one reader of that community asking where it is.
How do you see your newspaper changing over the next five years?
Under new family ownership, SSN is already undergoing a renaissance. Although The Call and The Press Herald were consolidated in 2010 to form South Schuylkill News, both newspapers had been shrinking in terms of content, resources and subscriber base, relying heavily on selected meeting coverage and reader submissions. A reversal of that trend is well underway. In a little more than six months, the newspaper has doubled its number of pages, expanded to include assigned feature and news stories and upgraded its regular offerings to include many items from King Features Syndicate, as well as increased the number of advertisers and, while newspapers collectively are seeing an opposite trend, there has been a bump-up in the number of subscribers, too.
In addition to printing every page in full-color, the new parent company opened other resources to SSN: graphics and design departments, photography, reporting and staff. Every Tuesday, Reading Eagle’s managing editor Dave Mowery and design editor Grant Mahon shift gears from their work on the Eagle to produce South Schuylkill News.
SSN is beginning to blend the traditional content of a small community newspaper with a daily newspaper feel — more news stories and stories of a broader range (covering county and state issues that have a local impact). Going forward, in terms of content, I’d like to feature more in-depth high school sports coverage and athlete profiles, plus more reader opinion forums and an expansion of reader or reporter-generated content in specific interest niches (much like blogs).
More digital content is also planned for SSN; a website is expected to be up and running in the not-too-distant future.
I believe local news and community-based human interest and event stories will still find a print market and readership in the immediate future because that content isn’t available elsewhere — a view echoed by SSN publisher and Reading Eagle editor Harry J. Deitz Jr.
”Newspapers remain one of the leading sources of news and the leading source when it comes to local news in most markets,” Deitz wrote in a recent column in the Eagle. And while Deitz believes digital delivery will one day replace print publications, many local readers in the here and now still prefer to hold a printed news product.
”I hear it from people every day,” he said.
Thanks to Teri Paulin for so generously sharing the news behind her local news. If you’d like your newspaper profiled for this series, contact David Cohea of King Features Weekly Service at dcohea@hearstsc.com.
