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PAPERS AS SEEN BY PRO'S AND OTHERS Life Blood of a Community." Said Ken Adams in 1993: "The value of a hometown newspaper first struck me several years ago while I, as a young man, was living in Central England. Being away from a small Utah town and thrust into a large urban area is difficult enough, let alone being separated from family and friends. Next to the regular letters from Mom and Dad, my most anticipated piece of mail was unquestionably the Morgan County News. "Woven through its pages were the history and happenings of a community steeped in pioneer heritage and laced with tidbits of everyday life. . . it seems a small paper can, over the course of a lifetime, report on and print the name of every citizen within the boundaries of its readership. The printed page will tell all - when you were born, if you earned a spot on the honor roll, how many touchdowns you made in your football career, when you graduated from high school and college. It carries lines concerning when you served in the armed forces, if you volunteered to carry your religion to others, and what girl you chose to marry. "Later it will announce the birth of each of your children. It will brag about your advancements in the workplace. It alerts the town to your appointment as president of the local Lions club and it will even type a few lines about your hernia operation. When the time comes the paper will alert the community to your demise and state in a few concentrated lines all your achievements from birth to death. No other media source does such a thorough job of reporting on the important things in life." There's a tie between Adams' recollection of reading the hometown paper while on the other side of the Atlantic and a 1955 readership inventory taken by the Vernal Express. Labelling itself "a typical Utah weekly," the Express said it had readers in 34 states and 10 foreign countries. "Typical Utah" all right -- the result of the widespread missionary program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Those papers were undoubtedly destined to other young men and women doing the work that took Adams to England. The 1934 Morgan County News quip had a parallel in a 409 |
