July 14, 2008

Learning something about a ‘community’

“Wherever you go,” a friend once told me, “there you are.”

So why are you where you are? Sometimes it’s just happenstance. Grandpa may have run out of gas here 70 years ago, met Grandma, and nobody’s wanted to move since. Sometimes it’s opportunity. That’s where I come in. Here -- in my case, at the News-Banner — was opportunity, and I’m making the long, arduous 22.5-mile journey east to find fame and fortune as city editor of this publication. (If it’s multiple choice, by the way, give me fortune.)

My goal is to soon become part of this community, even as we struggle to define what a “community” is. It has the same root word as “commune,” after all, but we are not in one of those “all for one and one for all” living arrangements. Yet we do have so much in common (another word from the same root), because every one of us wants what’s best for this place we all care about.

Years ago here in Indiana, a community was a small town. In 1900, most small towns in this state had something like three grocery stores, at least one doctor’s office, and a bank, all serving just a few hundred people. Then society became more mobilized. A trip to the county seat where the big stores were didn’t take the half a day required by a horse and buggy; it took a few minutes in the Model T or the Packard. After a while the small town’s grocery stores closed, the doctors moved into a clinic, and the banks -- well, we won’t talk about what the banks did. Another merger, after all, may be right around the corner.

So we’ve expanded this view of community to include an entire county. The Wells County Foundation doesn’t have the word “community” in its title, but that’s rare — most county foundations around us have it (Huntington County Community Foundation, Grant County Community Foundation, Blackford County Community Foundation) in their names. In the world of 2008, a county is a community. The folks in Ossian and Vera Cruz, Poneto and Murray, Bluffton and Tocsin, have a great deal in common, much more now than ever before. Continuing the theme, they use the same stores, the same doctors, and the same banks.

What people in these similar yet geographically different places require is a common thread to tie them together. That’s where the News-Banner comes in. We want to be the forum.

This is my thesis of this entire column, the reason for writing, and I think any community newspaper’s reason for being: We want to be the place where people talk to each other, where community leaders discuss issues, where businesses advertise their products, where weddings get announced.

I usually say that in another way, that a newspaper should be the place where the community talks to itself. That sounds like the guy in the grocery store muttering that his wife has sent him to buy ground beef for supper. (“I don’t want ground beef! Maybe I should pick up chicken. I like chicken.”)

The people I have in mind are the folks who live together in a community (there’s that term again). If city leaders in Bluffton want to convert Ind.-1 to a bike trail, people in Petroleum might have a tough time getting to the doctor’s office (the doctor who, a century ago, would have been in their own town). It’s not just a Bluffton deal. If it affects your life, or if it can affect your life, we want you to know about it.

I bring a lot of years of journalism experience my new posting here at the News-Banner, but I do not know everything. I’m sure I could produce scores of witnesses who would be able to tell you that Dave Schultz don’t know nothin’. This many years in this business, you get your share of fans.

I’m going to take several weeks to listen and learn — mostly, to listen — about what you want your newspaper to say and how you want it to say it. I have ideas, but I’ve seen disasters happen when new guys come in and throw out the baby with the bathwater. That’s not my style.

I’ve had a warm welcome here in Wells County, and I hope to meet more people over the next few weeks and months. I’ll be listening.

daves@news-banner.com

by DAVE SCHULTZ

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